


we are mirages (a trick of light; a sleight of hand)

by TheWoman (reyreyalltheway)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: 1880s, 19th Century, 19th Century Equivalent Of 'Broody Problematic Boy Next Door', 19th Century Equivalent Of 'Workaholic Cold-Hearted Bitch', Alternate Universe - Victorian, Angst, Childhood Friends, Childhood Sweethearts to Mortal Rivals to Secret Lovers AU, Dark Rey, Devoted Reylo, Enemies to Lovers, Exes, Explicit hand-holding, F/M, From space wizards to stage wizards, Graphic Depictions of Bodily Harm, Hardcore HEA, Hate Sex, Hate leads to suffering, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Neglect, Inaccuracies Be Damned, Love Letters galore, Masturbation, Minors, Misogyny, Mutual Pining, Non-Linear Narrative, Obsession, Oral Sex, Rey Nobody, Sexy De-Gloving, Stage Magicians AU, The Illusionist - Freeform, The Prestige - Freeform, They need new managers tbh, You might not think it but this is actually very:, underage shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:55:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24524995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reyreyalltheway/pseuds/TheWoman
Summary: Rachel Naiman — also known as The Marvelous Mistress Kira — disappears during her show in London, at the Falcon, on August 22, 1887.aka A Victorian Rival Magicians AU, loosely based onThe PrestigeandThe Illusionist.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 51
Kudos: 52
Collections: Reylo Hidden Gems





	1. are you watching closely?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thehobbem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehobbem/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Robbie. :) A dear friend and fellow reylo writer who has gotten me out of slumps more times than she probably knows. <3
> 
> CW: this first chapter is very explicit. mind the tags pls.

_we are mirages; a trick of light, a sleight of hand.  
when what we want is to be touchable again._

~.:.~

Rachel Naiman — known by her stage name as The Marvelous Mistress Kira — disappears during her show at the Falcon on August 22, 1887.

She has disappeared dozens of times before, and could believably do so again and again, every night, for as long as her audience would turn out their pockets to see her performing four, five, sometimes six nights of the week. For as long as she would reappear in her final act to take her bows, to the raucous applause of an insatiable London crowd.

But tonight, she does not come back to earth from _The Sky Walker_.

As the sellout theatre waits with bated breath, all eyes up at the ceiling, into which The Marvelous Mistress Kira has seemingly just _vanished_ — as the anticipation spreads with every ticking second that the lights bathe the empty stage longer than necessary — Rose feels her panic heighten.

This has never happened before. And much could be said of her wonderful Rey, but _unprofessional,_ she is not. 

This last prestige is the most important part of the trick; it’s what the patrons pay for.

But the disappearance drags on too long, and when the murmurs start from the orchestra, rippling outwards to the first and second balconies, Rose crosses the stage, heedless of protocol, to the other side of the wings; she is not there. Rose rushes below stage to the trap room; she is still not there.

Rose, trembling and unsteady, rushes up to the catwalk, and Rey is nowhere to be found.

Within the space of the following week, the disappearance had occupied the headlines of all major newspapers, with the primary suspect convicted in bold, typeset letters:

 **_Murderous Magic: American Showman_ ** **_  
_** **_Suspected of Foul Play Against London’s Lady Illusionist_ **

And by the next Saturday, an arrest was made in the West Central London residence registered to a certain Lucas Werner, but occupied by his nephew publicly renowned by the stage name, Lord Kyle O’Halloran.

~.:.~

_Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge’. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal._

_But of course... it probably isn't.†_

~.:.~

## 1886; ONE YEAR AGO

She is trembling.

From her fingertips to her breathing, short and tattered inhales, illicit in their response to the way his tongue presses deftly at the slick skin of her folds, the way it traces her, laves and suckles, the way his lips move, again and again, the weight of pleasure coiling her body tight. The feel of his mouth on her, unrelenting. Over and over, her hips attempting to mimic rhythm, to follow pressure.

Her wet hair is cold against her neck; her flushed chest heaving, sweat cooling her skin; his fingers on her thighs would slip, were they not gripping bruisingly so. 

She is soaked to the bone, and perhaps even deeper. 

He licks down and up, and Rey clutches at the armrests of the chair she is slouching in. He pushes her knee back against her body, and Rey convulses at the new openness. His thumb flicks at her bundle of nerves, and Rey gasps his name, her eyes shutting at the sensation.

Her arm reaches over her head, finds purchase on a crossbeam in the dingy theatre’s backstage. 

The air is damp in this small room with only one lamp. She can taste her shallow breaths: water and sweat and the heat of two bodies moving in the dark; her chemise is soaked and clings to her; his white shirt is patched darkly where he is sweating around the collar.

There is a pricking wetness behind her eyes that she does not think about.

She is close when he stops. Rey is thrown off course, coming down from a trance, opening her eyes to look at him—

He is there, kneeling before her, panting. Matching her breath for breath. 

A pause. His eyes lock on hers in the lamplight, unbreaking as he kisses the inside of the trembling thigh hooked over his shoulder. Rey tenses at the feel of him on her sensitive skin.

The way his lips press, and stay.

The way his eyes seem to plead something between them he cannot say.

Rey glares at him with a fierceness of her own: both of them balancing on a tightrope taut across their gazes. Debauched as they are in the moment.

They are not lovers. She is not his sweetheart, nor his mistress, nor his wife.

So when she is the first to break, her eyes dipping to the pink of his tongue as he licks his shiny lips of her, Rey ignores her skipped heartbeat and the longing that always follows.

(She could touch him. She could brush the errant, damp strands of his black hair off of where they fall on his eyes, wipe away the droplets beading his forehead. Kiss him with her mouth closed, if she leaned over. But she would not be able to pretend about such a gesture, so she keeps her fingers curled in the armchair, nails digging crescents into the leather.)

Rey thinks she sees something that mimics affection, passing his eyes. 

He breathes a smile to himself — _More secrets_ , Rey thinks sullenly — then nuzzles her thigh; his mouth opens this time, tongue touching skin. He keeps his eyes on her as something warm tilts a corner of his mouth, lazy and friendly as he catches his breath from pleasuring her.

It feels like a nail in the coffin.

She looks up and blinks away; the rafters are skeletal, but only just in the dim light.

His hands grip hard when his mouth returns on her with no warning; soft, dedicated strokes, as though he were savouring. As though he had all the time in the world. And Rey — barely holding on as it is, her cunt achingly edged — keeps her gaze to the ceiling. Pleasure builds, compounded by the slick sounds of him and her echoing gasps; her toes curl even as she resists giving in. 

Whether it’s from needing it to last, or not wanting to give him the immediate satisfaction, she hasn’t decided yet. Perhaps both.

“Let go.”

The words are growled. They are course and directive, impatient, almost desperately rumbling out of his mouth before adding the use of his fingers to her soaked softness as she writhes and pants.

Rey only briefly arches a brow at him, even as her body trembles. Even as she bites her bruised lip. 

_Make me,_ she doesn’t say.

He is ready and dying to see her come apart; keeping this from him is a kind of victory. So when he groans at her expression, nostrils flaring as he buries his face into her center again, nipping at her thigh from frustration, she knows she’s won the moment.

She could scoff, were she not wrestling with so much want, she could cry.

When he presses the flat of his tongue down in hard caresses, she makes a bright and choked sound, her mouth falling open, her eyes falling shut. Her hands finally find their way to him, grasping at his hair.

Her body has never felt quite like this.

The same could be said of her heart.

She can feel him — musk and pinewood and warm salt — on her tongue, on her skin, in and around her. Heady and familiar, an intimate marker of this tryst in the backstage dressing room of the Falcon; the air around them is thick with unspoken things.

A decade’s worth of secrets, threatening to burst out of her; a decade’s worth of letters and longing.

(She will _not_ think about it, she won’t, _she won’t—_ )

With no warning whatsoever he adds a third finger inside her and _curls._

She bites her lip against screaming; someone, literally _anyone,_ could hear.

He brings her close, _so close,_ with his fingers, balanced on the knife’s edge, her body gasping for release, her breathing shortened to rhythmic gasps with the friction of his fingers pressing up into her inner walls — and Rey races for it, runs after the mindless bliss with the ache, the sadness, not far behind — when he abruptly pulls them out. 

Rey watches him sit back on his heels.

His shoulders heaving, his mouth and lips shiny before he wipes them with his forearm, where his sleeves are rolled up; no tricks, nowhere to hide sharp objects.

On his face, when Rey looks, she finds a wildness she has never before seen a man possess. Her heart races again as longing of a deeper kind settles inside her from the image _._

Then he’s standing, bearing down on her, picking her up from her reclined state, gathering her to himself, his arms wrapping around her torso as he kisses her, and kisses her, and kisses her.

He licks her into her mouth, insistent, deliberate, and Rey tastes herself and all the ways her traitorous body has betrayed her. For him.

She does not stop shuddering; not when he moves his kisses — his mouth hot and heavy against her neck, her throat, the skin behind her ear. Her waterlogged chemise falls just at her thighs, and she isn’t sure if her legs are shaking from cold, or heat.

“Promise me,” he barely whispers while Rey starts trembling in his arms at the unbearable longing. “Promise me. Not the escape.”

His words come out in short and tattered exhales.

Rey clutches at his shoulders. She is still shaking down to her toes, but he is clutching her so close, so tightly. He is the only thing holding her together.

“I can’t—Can’t promise that,” she manages to gasp out as he presses a forceful kiss at her exposed shoulder. She feels teeth.

“Please,” is whispered against the shell of her ear before his mouth moves to kiss her jaw, her neck, wet and delirious, undoing her at the seams as his arms grip her to him. She can feel him straining against her hip; the line of their bodies pressed together leaves very little to the imagination.

“He’d n-never let me—oh God _, Ben_.” The exclamation follows a haze of blood-curdling want when his hand snakes beneath them both, past and beneath the hemline of her chemise, to breach her core and stroke her fast and deep, his other arm holding her against him while he kisses her all over, and _Oh, this is a delusion_ , Rey thinks, of the way her body unravels so easily at the man who she didn’t want to allow into her heart ever again.

_Too late._

Rey keens; small, sharp breathless sounds that match the rhythm he sets for her body, as her blood runs the way of his pacing, her toes curling against the scarred wooden floor while he fucks her with his hand.

When his mouth moves to her throat — when he cannot see her face — tears spill as pleasure blooms between her legs like punishment for her affections.

It takes mere moments.

Rey is gasping, open-mouthed, silent, breathing heavy, clutching herself against his massive frame as he slows his fingers down when he feels her shuddering release.

She does not give into the impulse of chanting his name.

He pulls out his fingers and holds her then, the sound of their breathing harsh against the late night; his arms come around her, his thumb drawing circles on her shoulder as he kisses her temple while she savours her high, their chests moving against one another. And for a small sliver of time, Rey gives herself permission to pretend: that the man holding her might perhaps love her, too.

She buries her face in his chest to keep a fresh wave of grief at bay.

He is still straining against his trousers, she notices, but he makes no movement. He merely anchors her to himself.

The dressing room feels smaller, somehow, with just the two of them wound around each other in the middle; a foggy, sleepy haze creeps up on her as her body regains its footing in the aftermath.

When her heart has formed some semblance of calm and her legs start to register the chill, even this, he seems to sense. She feels the smile he tries to hide against her hairline. “Cold?”

“No,” she answers quickly. Her reflexes always were to contradict him.

He chuckles. But he holds her closer anyway, presses his clothed legs against her bare ones anyway. Cages her in anyway, connected to her needs in a way Rey has never asked for.

Out of nowhere, it _irks_ her.

She never asked for this. For any of this. 

It hits her too late, where they are; all her secrets, all her tricks, could be pieced together from the knick knacks of this room: her cage-vest, her trick cabinet. The foldable knives and magnetic ramrod with its bullet still attached at the end. Her sketchbook is _right there_.

The room is warm and smells like them. 

Her magic tomorrow will be tainted by him.

But before she could utter any form of protest his hands move to cradle her face, making her look him in the eye, and Rey can only just register the dark quality of his expression. 

“Don’t do it. I mean it. Please, just— there are other things, other escapes, other tricks you can do.” Cradling her face, he kisses her fiercely again on her temple where her sweat beads, words whispered by the crown of her head: “Just not that. I could— If you would just stop being stubborn _for once,_ and _let me teach you._ ”

He laces his pleading with irritation now. An insistence that cuts too close to the bone.

Rey pauses, some dark thought clicking in her mind. 

_So this is the delusion,_ she thinks, this time bitterly. _This is the trick._

She grasps his wrists and pulls away; he must read it from her face because he frowns.

She never did enjoy knowing how his magic was done. And in her mind, she can hear Baz _,_ telling her what she was too stubborn to hear: _Love comes at a price, chérie. Always._

“Rey? Darling, look at me, please—”

But she pries his large hands away from her face; she cannot look at him. Suddenly, she cannot bear it, _any of it,_ and she takes a step back and then another, unable to voice the feeling of her heart cracking down the center, because what else can it do? 

There is only this one trick that has London lining up to watch her again, after _he_ had stolen them from under her nose. After _he_ had come here, to her city, back after ten long years of silence, only to upend the career that she has poured her soul into.

She turns away from him, gathering the vestiges of her senses back together. Her arms come around her to still the shaking.

 _Don’t do it,_ he tells her, and it feels like a trick.

“It’s—it’s the escape. That’s why you’re here,” she tells him after a moment, a final bitterness underlining her words. “Of course it is.”

“W-what?”

Shame — dark, hot, searing — floods her. Along with anger, brokenness. A kind of sadness she was always expecting to find, for all her wanting.

(It _hurts._ But then, it has always hurt. It has hurt for ten years.)

“You don’t want me performing the tank, is that it? Has it affected your margins all too much? Was this—was this Snoke’s idea?” she spits out, straightening her chemise properly now, finding enough spite to fuel her dignity as she hurriedly plucks her corset and drawers and petticoat from the floor, all of them still wet. “That’s why you’re here? To—to fuck me out of my ‘ridiculous’ little water escape?”

He has the decency to look aghast, she’ll give him that. 

She does not let him respond before she’s running her mouth against the unbearable revelation: “Has there been much—” she folds her still-cold drawers in quarters, tosses them beside her corset and then her petticoat next, “— _trouble_ for your margins, now that I’m back? Couldn’t bid Armitage to come here instead, could you? You just had to _wreck_ me yourself—”

She is cut off when in two strides he has her pinned against the wall, his body crowding against her, and if the lamplight were not enough to see his eyes by, the way he pins her hands up would tell her:

He is _seething._

“Is that what you think?!”

The anger in his words belies the slow, gentle way his hips move, strained and damp and still clothed, like the rest of him. There is a deliberate pressing down against her pelvis, until she knows that he wants her to feel him. Until she knows he is trying to make a point.

“You think I would—You think I could let anyone near you?!” he hisses through clenched teeth and ragged breaths, “You think I could—After seeing you _barely_ make it out _every time_ …”

He chokes on his words and looks away without finishing. Rey cannot see his expressions for how close they are in the near darkness. But she can feel him, hard against her hip. She can smell the heat of his body, the heavy musk and wood of his workshop, lingering on him. The cologne, the sweat. The years of him she knew, and the years of him she went on without, layered in the man before her.

Rey thumps her head back against the wall. She lets the tears swell and calm, unspilled, behind closed eyes.

All that rings in her exhausted mind is _Of course it’s what I think. What else would I think?_

And beneath that, _You left me once._

And still deeper, _You will again._

His grip loosens against her wrists, and it cannot be intentional, the way his fingers inch up from her wrists, until they can loosely fidget with her fingertips. He is breathing deeply, in and out, his chest pressed against the thin material of her chemise. Still not looking at her.

 _Fool,_ she thinks, and does not know if she’s speaking to him, or to herself, when she remembers the way he used to play with her hands so many years ago.

He starts to tremble.

Rey can feel it: the white knuckled restraint, the corners of him forcibly dulled. The way his shoulders fold in on himself — his massive frame a mechanism all on its own — as he struggles to fit back into his senses; no one else would know, but Rey hates that she notices. And hates herself even more for how much it hurts her, to feel him like this.

He leans in on a shaky breath; her spine curves up in the slightest to meet him, urged only by instinct. Pressing closer, he ghosts his lips by the line of her jaw, before kissing her on the cheek, sweet and brief and trembling a little at the edges.

 _Utter fool._ But this directed only to herself, when she feels her heart breaking at the contact.

He steps away, releasing her. 

She opens her eyes to see him back enough that the light spills over him in muted warmth. Something is shuttered behind his face. There is a resolve there, to hold his secrets and shut her out. Something she has seen before.

Rey feels the shards of her broken heart lodge themselves in her lungs; she could never be worth more to him than his secrets. She cannot possibly compete with his devotion to his craft.

_You will always love your magic more than anything. And I will have only this._

His mouth opens, then closes, then opens again, but to nothing. His eyes are subdued, pained, and there is much to be said of the way words seem to slip him by, one by one, until his expression settles on a kind of disenchantment. She sees the moment that the fight goes out of him, exorcised by her presence, probably.

Exactly like the way she had always expected the other shoe to drop. 

She would break at the look in his eyes, had she not known this was always where they were headed. Him, disappointed; her, disappointing.

“Apologies,” he tells her in tones nearly too low to hear. “I did not mean to take up so much of your time.”

She scoffs. It doesn’t sound as biting as she’d hoped. Only bitter.

Distantly, she can hear someone — Rose, perhaps — prowling the backstage, likely looking for her.

“You know the way out,” she tells him, returning to the wet garments she was in the process of putting away. She does not look at him. 

Only when she can sense that his presence has completely retreated does she let the dam break, and the sobs spill from her silently as she clutches her mouth. His taste lingers.

She’d always known there was a price to pay for a good trick.

But she had not expected just what it would cost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The world is a mess and I'm a little messed up right now, but I hope this small thing brings you joy, the way it has done for me. Not sure when i'll take this out of anon, but for now, I would like to detach myself a bit from all my works.
> 
> Comments would be so very appreciated, but also quite helpful. :)
> 
> A few housekeeping notes. Please read:
> 
> >> Loosely based on (and takes A LOT of elements from) †The Prestige (2006) and The Illusionist (2006). They are the backbone of my research; pls direct all inaccuracy complaints to Nolan and Burger.
> 
> >> If you are a historian specialising in the 19th century, please leave now, I beg you. This will be nothing but an inaccurate, uncoordinated, poorly-researched mess. 
> 
> >> This fic is non-linear and will therefore bounce between timelines: the 1870s Before, and the 1885-86 After (which are the events leading to 1887 Current).
> 
> >> That said, Ben is five years older than Rey in this story.
> 
> >> Things this fic WILL NOT have:  
> Underage Sex  
> Non-Con / Dub-Con  
> Physical Abuse that occurs between the protagonists
> 
> >> Things this fic WILL have:  
> Very explicit, begrudging sex between two very angry people  
> Sexually charged scenes from the perspective of a minor (17 years old)  
> Portrayals of misogyny, familial / parental abuse, and neglect  
> Graphic descriptions of bodily harm  
> Two rivals who are pushed to sabotage + hurt one another in various ways. Please be forewarned.
> 
> >> Trigger warnings will be at the beginning of the chapters. DETAILED trigger warnings will be in the chapters’ END NOTES. If you’re unsure about the initial trigger warnings, please click on “See the end of the chapter for notes”.


	2. an examination of history

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> baby reylo aka you can pry Sand Gremlin Rey from my cold, dead hands.

_give me hope in silence; it’s easier, it’s kinder._ _  
__tell me not of heartbreak; it breaks my soul, it breaks my soul._

~.:.~

## 1871; THE BEGINNINGS

Rachel Naiman had grown up in an orphanage, before she had become the ward of a certain Herr Palpatine: an elusive old gentleman who had cared little for her growing up, except to house her in his countryside home in Dorset. She had been ten years old when she was plucked from London’s poorest district, and moved two hundred miles away from the city.

When she is thirteen, the neighbouring estate receives its first visitors in several years.

The family — some long-sounding name that Rey herself did not care to remember — was said to have been on holiday there, for the summer. Ever so curious about new faces (as she hardly ever saw anyone outside of the house staff, apart from her tutor) Rey bounded to the nearby manor-house one afternoon when she was sure no one would be looking for her.

They hardly ever did, anyway.

Summer meant that the rolling fabric of the countryside was Rey’s second home, and she could map the land by heart, with her hands tied and her eyes closed. She knew of the old manor-house estate two hills over; she’d seen it more than once on her regular adventures, and had often dreamed of breaking in for herself to discover what lay inside the stern, stone facade.

From afar, Rey thought the property looked haunted and terribly angry, especially after a thunderstorm. All untrimmed hedges and angry vines. It would not be surprising to find a graveyard out back. 

From up close, where she had discovered a gap and snuck in through the poorly-made fencing, it looked simply sad. As though it was tired of holding too many secrets.

Rey imagines she’d like to get to know those secrets one day.

(There was no graveyard behind the house; only an unpruned cherry tree at the cusp of fruiting.)

The estate rivals the very one she lives in, though she was not so free to explore the Palpatine grounds the way she does so now as a trespasser. Rey rounds to the back of the manor-house, just as the sun hits the unruly, shrubbery gardens in a way that fills Rey with light in her lungs.

Finally, she is able to sneak inside through the kitchen’s backdoor, blessedly left unlocked.

The house is old and dusty, its furniture covered over with white linen sheets, spots of square on the wall where grand paintings must have once hung for decades. Passing by brass-gilded staircases and locked doors, creeping along the hallways and between pillars, and very much giddy with mischief, Rey sticks to the crevices of the large house — sneaking past the sparse staff — as she follows the sounds of voices, quiet as a mouse. She can hear them speaking, but their English sounds funny, and when she softly crouches and peers around the archway of the living room parlor, she can see three adults: a man, a woman, and someone who seems to be their butler, serving them tea.

It doesn’t take them long to spot her. It takes them exactly a moment.

“Who are you?”

She squeaks at the voice behind her and turns abruptly around; she is regarded by a tall, gangly boy with dark hair falling about his eyes. He is holding two suitcases, bringing them inside from the carriages out front, carrying one in each hand and a very curious expression. The afternoon sun slants across his face from the large foyer windows, and it turns him into a creature worlds apart from her own childish imaginings.

“I’m Rey,” she says, only a breath above a whisper.

.:.

Despite her dirtied dress, her unruly, leaves-infested hair, and the fact that she is a sneaky intruder, Rey is cordially invited by Mr. Solo himself to join them for tea; the Mrs. Solo warms towards her within the space of two minutes, cooing amusedly when Rey sips her tea too fast and burns her tongue. For her self-consciousness — and lack of experience with social niceties and people in general — is overshadowed by her joy at being in the presence of a welcoming family.

They ask her about her parents (to which she politely responds that she has only a guardian), her home (two hills over, with the tall walls and black gates), and her schooling (taught by a tutor, and that was all she was to say to that). 

Indeed, Rey feels herself blushing at more points in the conversation than she had ever thought she could, not of embarrassment but simply excitement, and the feeling of being so close to something she’d never dreamed of basking in.

And when Arthur, their butler, brings in the cookies and sweets tray to set at the centre table, Rey’s eyes nearly bulge out. 

(For she had never been so fortunate as to be offered treats; not in the time before, and not after.)

This is how the boy — Ben, as he was introduced by his mother before he went off to finish attending to their luggage — finds her: sitting at the carpeted floor by the table, stuffing herself with treats as Mr. and Mrs. Solo amusedly laughed.

He cocks an eyebrow at her before finding his place at the corner of a chaise, plucking a cookie from the tray before sitting down, quiet and disinterested. 

Rey hardly ever saw anyone her own age since the orphanage. And despite being clearly older, he is still the youngest person she has seen, by far, in a long time. Granted, he seems disinclined towards all manner of warmth — so very _unlike_ his own parents, whom she has known for a grand total of ten minutes — but Rey is not one so easily dissuaded.

She decides to like him, then and there. Just because.

“What’s that?” she asks him, wiping crumbs off her mouth with the back of her hand. She gestures at his sleeve, where he seems to be hiding something. It is Mr. Solo who answers her query:

“Benjamin here is going to be a magician, just like his old man,” he tells Rey, sparing a wink in Ben’s direction. “Aren’t you, son?”

“Oh yes, Ben, do show our guest a few tricks!” his mother adds. 

She watches as Ben regards his parents with something like exasperation, before coming up with a small purple ball in his left hand, seemingly out of nowhere.

Rey stops chewing. 

And as though held in an inexplicable trance, Rey found herself still staring at his hand when — _still_ out of nowhere — he makes the ball disappear, and with little more than a wave of his hand, suddenly, he is holding a flower instead.

He leans over and gives it to her. 

Mrs. Solo is delighted, and Mr. Solo is commenting how it is one of Ben’s better executions of the trick, but Rey does not hear any of that. She is lost in the flower, and the fact that it is real. Rey touches the leaves and the petals, and wonders what it feels like; what kind of power it was to make the thing in her hand appear so, where it was not before.

“That was... _amazing_ ,” Rey breathes, but mostly only to herself as she recovers from shock. She keeps staring at the daisy, twisting the short stem between fingers, as though it might disappear the same way he had seemingly plucked it out of thin air.

Ben must have seen the look on her face, for when she finally glances up at him there is the beginning of a small boyish smile, appearing where it was not before.

Suddenly, Rey knew what it felt like, too.

This is the first time she meets magic. The first breathlessness, one of many to come.

~.:.~

 **F** rom **A** cross **T** he **A** tlantic **C** omes **T** he **G** reatest **M** agician **O** f **O** ur **G** eneration. YOU HAVE SEEN THE PLAIN TRICKS AND TRAPPINGS OF STAGE MAGIC, NOW YOU CAN **BEHOLD THE REAL FORCES OF THE MYSTICAL!** The Millennium Theatre Presents: **THE DARK LORD, KYLE O’HALLORAN.** Fresh From His American Tour, He Has Arrived in England to Perform Feats of Magic Hitherto Unknown. **W** atch **T** he **S** ecrets **O** f **T** he **D** ark **A** rts **U** nfold **B** efore **Y** our **V** ery **E** yes. **LIMITED ENGAGEMENT!**

~.:.~

## 1885

London at the end of the 19th century brings the dawn of a new era: from medicine to manufacturing, from communication to fashion — more and more, it seemed that the newspapers of the day had enough to tell about advances in various fields. From light that had no need of fuel, to mass transportation that ran underground, novel and terrifying and shaking the very foundations of the city, civilized society was growing accustomed to the miracles of what was previously thought unbelievable. 

Amidst the allure of an age man has never before seen, magic became great. 

Where once wizards and the like would have been shunned none too gently, now they are celebrated and sought; stage magicians — escapists, illusionists, conjurors, and those who have branded themselves similarly in the art of performance — grew ever more popular.

And none more so than a woman named Rachel Naiman.

This is her name, but it is not a very common one of hers. For she is only this in records. On stage, she is her public persona, Mistress Kira. And, to her very few close acquaintances, she is neither Mistress Kira nor Rachel — the young woman who grew up confined in the estates of one of London’s most powerful — but _Rey_. 

Just another struggling stage magician living in the London grey.

The days of countryside living are far behind her. Now, Rey lives alone by the backbone of the city, bordered between the busy downtown streets of Central London, and the ramshackle, crowded neighbourhoods she had been orphaned in; she could find herself by the workhouses near the docks in one direction, and by the theatre district in the other. Hers is a perfectly middled existence, and she is content to walk in either direction when necessary.

She has known hard labour, and she has known the glory of applause; as a rule, she goes without preference for one or the other, for she knows just how dangerous it is to presume about what tomorrow may bring. One must only be prepared to survive. Nothing else.

It is on a Tuesday, a few weeks before her previews for her show, when she reads the news in the paper. She nearly chokes on her tea.

Shaking, she sets her cup down and, with trembling fingers, re-reads the passage once more at the corner of the bottom fold. Her eyes glaze over the printed announcement of a new show, a new performer just across from where she had been scheduled at the Falcon for the upcoming season in the West End.

A rival showman, coming to give Londoners some variety.

She bites down on her lip until it feels numb. _Of course,_ she thinks, as something like lead crowds her chest and her vision darkens from intensity. _Of course he would._

And in her mind, there he is: a montage of sunlit summers, of pale skin and river water, and the seeming endlessness of unbroken promises. Her memories still tainted him of wonder and waiting and falling, without yet knowing what she was falling into. 

Rey buries her head in her hands as her thoughts run away from her.

But before she can ruminate on his arrival, two sharp raps at her door have Rey standing up, hastily smoothing her messy hair and skirts before opening. She freezes upon the sight of the man, who walks past her without preamble as though he owned the very space she breathed.

Which he does, in a manner.

“Herr Palpatine, I was just meaning to—”

He holds his cane up and Rey instinctively holds her tongue.

The man that enters her flat is old, tailored, and very much out of place in Rey’s cramped little second-storey flat. But from his hat, to his ivory cane, to his gleaming gold pocket-watch, he is not so much a fish out of water, as a lion out of a cage.

There is a moment that he does not speak. Merely looks at her and waits for her to read the full extent of both warning and disappointment in his eyes.

“I assume you’ve read the papers,” he tells her.

“Yes. Yes, I just. Just now, this morning.”

A beat, made for eyeing her once. Up and down, and with that pass of his gaze over her, she is at once inadequate and faulty, the very problem with society. With the world itself.

Rey falters in her gaze, looks anywhere else.

“And will it be a problem for us, Miss Naiman? We both know you have yet to reach your full capacity as a performer. What more now that you have… _distinct_ competition?”

Rey is not able to respond fast or confidently enough. 

“H-he will be no match for—”

“ _He is and must very well be!”_

The words — angry, thunderous — are pronounced alongside a single strike of his cane against the hardwood floor, unexpected as lightning in a cloudless sky. Rey flinches; a response she has learned over many years.

He lets a moment for the fear to wash over her completely, before continuing with the calm of an old gentleman who could do no harm:

“He comes from a long line of magicians, my dear. _Professionals_ . Surely, you understand, a reputation like his might perhaps _trample_ your blooming career underfoot… Unless we manage to do something about it. You see?”

He uses his cane to tilt her chin up, for her to look into his eyes. Rey masters her emotions and does as she is gestured, with the kind of steel that the Herr will want to see.

“I prefer these things taken care of _preemptively._ No need to give him the opportunity for a queue. We must protect our margins. Better yet, I want to see a new trick before your previews. Something terribly clever that can ensure you have at least a snowball’s chance in hell to go head-to-head with a Solo for the duration of the season. Do you see what I mean, girl?”

“I understand.”

And she does. Whether she agrees, likes or dislikes, it matters not. What is important is that she understands well enough to know to do what it takes.

When she has ushered her benefactor out of the living space that he lends her, when she has locked the door of the apartment shut, Rey takes a moment to observe her surroundings: the pieces of her life, all that she is worth, scattered about her. Her tricks, her magic, the machinery by which The Marvelous Mistress Kira comes alive.

Her cot in the corner. Her sketchbook beneath it, and her tin box of letters beneath that. All the things that are hers, and all the things that are not. She takes a deep breath, thinking of a world where she loses all of it. A world where she can simply disappear. 

~.:.~

 **C** ome **O** ne, **C** ome **A** ll! Witness The **FIRST AND ONLY** **L** ady **I** llusionist **O** f **T** he **A** ge! You Have Heard Of Her, You Have Seen Her. Now, Watch Her Command The Stage Like Never Before! **THE MARVELOUS MISTRESS KIRA** , Now Performing At The Falcon Theatre. Featuring: The Dazzling, Daring, And Dangerous Magic Of The Late **LUCAS WERNER**!

~.:.~

## 1872

“Are you watching closely?”

Rey, of all her fourteen years, could not stop watching if she tried.

His hand moved, and whether it was to steal her attention or to steal her breath away, she knew not. The ball bounced, spun around his deft fingers, woven as through invisible strings, back and forth and back again. Rey did not blink.

The boy moved his fingers once more, bouncing a knuckle on her nose, and the ball was gone.

Rey gasps, and Ben smiles.

She cannot help it; she takes his hand, looks for the ball in his sleeves, up his arms.

“Where is it? Where did it go?”

So busy was she being astounded that she does not register his flustered state as she proceeds to search the rest of his person, trying to run her hands all over his vest, the pockets of his trousers, the small space of floor between their folded legs in the attic of his home.

The summer afternoon flowed through the west-facing dormer window, a spotlight against them both as Rey wildly looked about her and about him, for a little purple rubber ball.

She could _swear_ she had kept her eyes open the whole time.

But he stills her wandering hands and holds them stiffly before they could wander any further: “You’re not—Rey, _listen_ , you won’t—”

He goes unheeded as Rey — bright and fierce and absolutely _determined_ to show him that he cannot trick her — _lunges_.

She could swear she had seen it get tucked _somewhere._ She will not be beaten this time.

But Ben seems to know her too well, and she is not able to wrestle the secret out of him before he uses his unfair advantage of years to match her sudden outburst with strength of his own; they roll over and the wind is knocked out of her, as she lands on her back, and she pushes where he pushes and pulls where he pulls, loud and rowdy.

She had spent most of last summer with Ben, watching him practice tricks and introducing him to the countryside, and she had found a pleasant match in him: an anchor to her wildness, a tempest to her sunshine. She liked that she had, perhaps for the first time in her life, found someone who was just as intense as she could be.

And perhaps, someone who was as much an outsider as she often secretly felt.

And though he might be older, Rey had discovered that he was still also just like her, in many respects: rebellious and childish, and a little different around others compared to when it was just the two of them.

So when she gives up — after a fair amount of laughter and yelping, and winded breaths from giving him no quarters, for it felt like she had saved up all her energy for the year to be able to spend it all this summer with him — they lie still on the floor, side by side under the dark of the attic and the glowing evening sun.

She does not find the rubber ball. But she’d forgotten about it anyway.

“You-you won’t—you can’t just tackle a secret out of a magician,” Ben tells her between pants, both of them staring at the ceiling. His voice is very low. “Nothing you do can make a real magician give up his secret.”

She turns her head to look at him. His profile is a silhouette against the round window’s orange sky.

“Nothing?”

She watches half of his features turn musing: the way a corner of his mouth would turn up, whenever he’d think of the very secrets he kept from her.

“Well, there’s one thing.”

And his hand comes up, glances against her ear, seemingly pulling the elusive purple ball right out of it. He bounces the ball against her nose and Rey smells the rubber, before he places it in her hand, between them.

“You need to have secrets of your own.”

Rey thinks about that for a little while, her nose scrunching as she tries to understand. Her fingers absently play with the ball he placed in her palm.

“What kind of secrets?” 

He laughs; it is deep and rumbling and floods the space of the attic. “You ask too many questions.”

“I have no one else to ask!” she tells him, a bit defensively. “Just you,” she adds, a little more quietly, tacked at the end of a pause. As though she never meant to say it out loud.

He is quiet for a few moments, before he speaks. And when he does, it seems almost only to the air above them, and not to her. Like a secret he didn’t mean to spill, but does so anyway: 

“You’re my only friend, too.”

~.:.~

“ _In sum: The Marvelous Mistress Kira’s creative twists to tried-and-true tricks will undoubtedly leave her audience breathless and wanting to line up again and again, if only to bear witness to history being made. This newfound, unorthodox performance, and one done by a member of the fairer sex, no less, will usher a new dawn for stage magic, but as to the nature of this dawn, time has yet to tell. For what place does a woman have, in the high art of illusion?_

_We must be wary, lest she give our wives and our daughters ideas that are as unseemly as they are untrue.”_

_— The London Evening Standard, “Magic, or Mayhem? Lady Illusionist Dazzles With First Previews”, June 1884_

~.:.~

## 1885

Rey yelps in pain and a crisp exclamation when her wire cutter slips and gashes her other hand. Her assistant Rose runs to her side, abandoning her sewing adjustments immediately as Rey raises her hand above her head, to stave off the bleeding.

“You’ll cut a finger off, you will,” Rose chides. “Let me see.”

“I’m alright, I’m quite fine.” But Rey hisses anyway when she brings down her hand and sees the deep gash the tool has made on the meaty flesh, and how much blood it is running with. Rose grimaces. The wound is red and split, and even more ghastly when seen against the calluses of Rey’s open palm. The depth of the cut is _deeply_ inconvenient. “Bloody _hell_.”

“That’s a nasty one. You might want to ease up on the tinkering—”

“My previews are in two weeks’ time. Herr Palpatine will be expecting something he hasn’t seen before, he’s expecting _this,_ he’s expecting a, a, a _phenomenon_ or some new invention of my own and I can’t just—”

The words rush out of her in a torrent as she blinks back her emotions, tries to tamp them down. But she remembers who is performing their previews tonight and Rey kicks the corner of her workshop table with enough frustration to rattle the floorboards.

She raises her hand over her head again, uncaring of the line of blood dripping down, staining her sleeve.

“You’ve not eaten good and well in _days_ ,” Rose tells her. “Pretty soon you won’t see straight enough for a hat trick, let alone a—”

“ _I am aware_ , thank you,” she bites out, regretting the harsh tone as soon as the words leave her. “Sorry. I’m sorry, Rose.”

“S’okay,” Rose tells her, going to the sink for something to clean and dress the wound with, but Rose’s eyes are drawn to the contraption on Rey’s work table. The same one she’d only just started to put together that morning. “Bit late to try to invent something for the show, isn’t it? What is it?”

“It’s… just something I thought of, last night.”

She had been tinkering with the concept in her mind’s eye, turning it over and over, yet had not quite figured out with finality how the mechanism should work, were she to build it. But, with the threat of real competition, she had set to work on it already: a small cage that could fold into her sleeves. A twist to the popular caged-bird trick.

She’d started working on the machine, resolving to “iron out the kinks” along the way.

She has not, however, ironed out the kinks just yet.

The springs were too difficult to ply, the wires too spry and unpredictable, and an incorrect placement could have her fingers trapped and broken in the bars, mid-trick.

She cares less about her fingers, however, than she does about keeping her livelihood and staying in the good graces of her patron.

Rose eyes her with unconcealed dismay, disappointment, perhaps a little exhausted pity.

“You get like this, I know that,” she tells Rey, gently lowering her hand to tend to her wound, “You get your moods and take it out on the tricks, but you can’t keep going like this.” A sigh — deep and melancholy — blows out of Rose as she tries to bandage Rey’s hand. “Take a break, or see a show, to keep your mind right, perhaps. I heard there’s a new American magician in town, opening same time as you. Maybe you should go.”

It’s not a question. It’s a very firm suggestion from an exasperated friend.

Rey keeps silent as she blames the universe for such an uncanny setup.

“We can hardly afford the extra expenses—”

“I know his stagehand for the previews. Can get you in, if you want.”

Rey isn’t sure she does. But she decides to go anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> times are shit. this is one of the few things that's keeping me sane rn, so if it can bring anyone else joy too, then i am glad.
> 
> if you were hoping for a very ~victorian~ Victorian AU, i am so sorry. i have no idea how far out of "historically and generally inaccurate" this is, which is to say: probably "very". it's ok, we can all pretend.
> 
> and on that note, cheers to whoever can guess why i chose Dorset, and which other movie i am now butchering for "research". ;) 
> 
> and on that note, this chapter sounds like [this](https://open.spotify.com/track/0x1rnXl24iJl8xZFMkoyNv?si=xPc1C5LhSiSTTXNAEOUOoA). :)
> 
> COMMENTS WOULD BE SUPER APPRECIATED!!! Thank you so much for reading this wild experiment of mine! <3


	3. something you’ve never seen before, pt. 1

_we will meet back on this road; nothing gaining, truth be told.  
but i am not the enemy; it isn’t me, the enemy._

•❖•

## 1873

“...and where, exactly, was the Peloponnesian War fought, Miss Naiman?”

The question might as well have been a sparrow flying outside the window, for the lack of heed Rey gave it. Her knee is bouncing, her pen stilled on her paper, an ink blot blooming at the tip as she gazes out the window of the study, while Monsieur Malaurie fixes her with a look that should be able to melt steel.

As it is, fifteen-year-old Rey is made of stronger stuff.

She keeps the rubber ball hidden in the folds of her dress. Even when she gets five firm slaps across the wrist with a ruler, even when she is sent to bed with no supper at the instruction of her tutor, and even when she is given far too many reading assignments to reasonably finish in time for recitation the following morning; Rey’s spirits are unbounded.

For she had heard the staff tittering about carriages seen sometime in the late afternoon yesterday, bringing a vacationing family to the neighbouring estate. She had expected them any day now, for spring was nearing its end, melting away into summer’s long daylight.

The little rubber ball comfortably tucked into the sleeve of her dress felt like an incredible secret indeed.

Reasonably sensing that she was up to no good, Rey’s tutor insisted she be locked in her own room with her reading, and her guardian conceded without so much as looking up from his own desk.

(As if a locked door had ever stopped her.)

That evening, Rey waited long enough to know the household asleep, but not too long so as to miss her window of opportunity. She got out of bed, hastily half-dressed and piled on two scarves, and left her second-storey bedroom through her window. The moon wasn't gracious that night, and so she had fumbled her way down from the rooftop onto the wet evening grass with more than a few scrapes, but no matter.

The trek across two hills was difficult, but not impossible. The night was cold, but she walked fast and could ascertain her direction from the silhouettes of the trees alongside the well-worn paths between their grounds, her soft boots silent against the crickets and noises of a summer night.

When finally she saw the manor-house, she was relieved to see the warm yellow glow from Ben’s bedroom window.

Climbing the yew tree beside Ben’s room on the second floor, excitement had warmed her enough to forget the chill and her chattering teeth. She peeps inside and isn’t surprised to find him in his bedclothes, reading a book on his bed by lamplight.

She taps loudly at his window, a smile pinching her cheeks.

He nearly knocks the lamp out in surprise; the book flies out of his hands when he nearly flings himself in shock.

Rey stifles the beginnings of a loud guffaw behind her palms; the Solos were light sleepers.

When finally he recognized her, with a look of pure confusion and disbelief, he unlatches his window, but not to let her in:

“What in God’s name, _Rey—_ ”

It doesn’t matter that his body is blocking the window; she launches into a hug and tackles herself into his room in the process.

•❖•

Despite Ben’s insistence that she cannot, in fact, _be here,_ Rey brushes his pleas as mere babbling and ignores most of him in favour of what she does best:

“Where’d you get this?!”

Rey picks up the book he’d been reading before she’d appeared at his window. _The Magician's Own Book, or the Whole Art of Conjuring,_ said the title in gold filigree on worn leather, and Rey dodges Ben around his room as she beheld the book in her hands while he tried to take it back.

“My uncle. Listen, Rey, you shouldn’t be here,” he keeps talking in a steady stream, despite following her to pick the leaves off her hair and taking his coat from where it hangs at the back of his door to wrap it around her shoulders. “I don’t know what you were _thinking_. If Ma woke up—”

“Can I borrow it?”

“Yea—No, I’m still reading it—”

“Play you for it.” Rey shoves his hand away and hides the book behind her with both hands, waiting for him to pick up the challenge.

He looks struck with half disbelief, half confusion. “It’s mine.”

Rey steps back quickly enough to dodge his hand again, before her other hand comes up and — with a deftness she’d been practicing for a whole year — procures a little rubber ball in front of his face, seemingly out of thin air.

He is tall enough not to be cross-eyed at it.

At once, then it dawns on him, and Rey watches with an unnamable happiness when his lips twitch against a smile, and then he’s huffing and chuckling at her little ball trick. He seems to be laughing to himself, not meeting her eyes first, and Rey wishes she could ask him what great secret was going through his head _this time,_ when he meets her eyes.

And holds her gaze with a warmth that was far more than what she’d seen in them before.

Warmth of a different kind fills her, like magic.

“May I?” he asks, before the moment could be named, and he holds out his hand.

Ben did not often ask. He took, or he tricked, or he stole with playful abandon, same as Rey. Their previous two summers had been a contest, and she considered them both on the same score; where he’d outrun her across the meadow, she’d outsmart him up the old yew tree. Where he’d hide the purple ball, she’d sneak half of his sandwich out from under his nose. They had always been equals, always matched strength for strength.

Neither of them were in the habit of letting the other win.

Except now, with his hand outstretched, asking her for something he does not even try to take. As though she had earned his respect.

It feels like a victory. 

Rey gives him the ball; their hands brush.

Even more deftly than she’d ever seen, despite not having had it all year, he weaves the rubber ball between his fingers, like muscle memory. Rey’s eyes are transfixed on the purple, a hawk watching its prey, waiting for the moment it would try to disappear. Ben plays with it, bounces it up and down, turns it around his fingers, bounces it from palm to palm. Rey can see them now: the moments of weakness, the points at which he could hide or swipe the ball into a trick. A practiced hand is a trained eye, after all.

But he does not make it disappear.

He holds it still, suddenly, and as though retreating back into himself to enjoy yet another secret he would not share. He chuckles. 

“What’s so amusing?” Rey asks.

Ben looks up at her, the smile in his eyes almost fond. 

“Let’s see you at it.”

He tosses the ball to her. She catches it just as he takes two steps back to sit at the edge of his bed. Rey is startled for a moment, until she realizes that he is simply watching her, leaning forward, his long arms on his bony knees. Waiting for her to show him all that she’s got.

He is her first audience.

She is suddenly nervous. 

Rey weaves the ball between her fingers, back and forth, just like how she’s seen him so many times. Just like how he taught her to, in what seemed like an eternity ago last summer. And while the long sleeves of her plain muslin dress night be more cumbersome to the novice conjurer, she does not let it get in the way.

She is no novice. Not anymore.

She bounces it in her palms, up and down, back and forth. But she weaves it and suddenly, she stutters and it is no longer in her fingers.

Rey feigns a look of surprise. Ben arches his eyebrows. She turns her empty hands over, looks at them, just as startled as an invisible audience in a magic show, and she does not break character when she sees Ben buying into her act. 

She makes as if to look around her, for wherever she might have dropped the small ball.

“I—where’d it go?” Rey asks, acting for all the world like the ball had disappeared with a mind of its own. “Did I drop it?”

Ben, to her surprise, looks absolutely confused.

“No, I—I don’t…. think so.” He looks around the floor around them as well.

“D’you take it?”

Ben’s brows draw together. “No.” He sounds appalled at this very thought.

Now Rey _really_ puts on a show. “Don’t lie to me.” She makes her voice break, feigning hurt and betrayal. “Did you get it?”

He is taken by her expression and looks stricken himself. “ _No_ , I didn’t take it, I didn’t even see it fall—”

“You did, didn’t you? You took it!” She takes a step towards him, and Ben stands up abruptly, looking panicked at her display.

“Rey, why would I take your ba—”

Rey gasps as loud as she can, as though seeing something monstrous at his chest, and in the same breath she then shoves him right there, where his heart is. From where her hand hits him square on the breastbone, a small rubber ball bounces out as Rey catches it mid-air.

She drops the act in a blink as she holds the ball up to him, smiling and giddy and half-laughing at his wide eyes and gaping mouth: “Tada! So you did have it!”

He looks for all the world as though he hadn’t the faintest clue what just happened.

She’d imagined this routine for a whole year, practiced it for just as long. And it was all worth it, seeing him catch up to the act, as though blinking out of a haze, and then he is clutching his chest and laughing along with her.

 _This is magic,_ she thinks with something light in her chest.

He tells her, between restrained laughter, what a damned _trick_ that was, and how brilliant it was, and how brilliant _she_ is, and Rey finds herself bowing with exaggeration and quietly laughing along with him, hiccuping and delighted, if only to avoid lingering on his praises. When they have both recovered, sitting at the edge of his bed, Ben wipes the tears at the side of his eyes and just looks at her for a good while.

Rey maps the droop of his features, the starkness of his nose and the curvature of his mouth when it has relaxed into the barest restraints of a smile. The lamplight glances off of his eyes and the black hair and the tips of his ears.

She had read about handsome men, in the meagre books and stories of fiction in her library. But Rey had struggled with the concept; too many of those books spoke of jaws and eye colors and honeyed hair and sun-tanned skin. Rey could not picture them. None of those descriptions made her think of tall boys with a love for magic and too many secrets and a warmth in their eyes. None of them ever described handsomeness in calloused hands that reached down to pull her up a branch, or in traded and underlined books, or in countless hours teaching her how to hold a rubber ball between the fourth and fifth fingers.

But there was also a darkness to beauty that no book could describe; something alluring in the secrets that he kept, in glimpses of his temper and the violence of his passion when he cannot get a trick right, or when he was in a mood. Rey had found herself too often turning him over in her mind, looking for the shadows of him, if only to feel a little less alone herself.

Something strange and wonderful warms her cheeks.

Ben clears his throat before abruptly standing up and heading to his dresser. “I’ve got you something.”

He rummages to the bottom, and pulls out a book. He hands it to her, and Rey gets the distinct impression that he is shy about it, what with the way he seems to stare at the floor, shifting his weight, before sitting back beside her on the bed, bouncing just a little further away from her than she’d like, awkwardly avoiding looking at her and yet unable to keep from staring out of the corner of his eyes.

Rey touches the leather-bound hardcover. _The Poems of John Keats._

“I saw you reading sonnets last summer, I thought–I just saw that, really. In our library at home. Reminded me of you.”

“It’s perfect,” Rey breathes, understanding now why he won't look at her; she does not want to catch his eyes either.

She feels rather like kindling that some small spark might set aflame. 

“You like it?”

The low, quiet baritone takes her aback; his voice has always been set into the lower octaves, but this is lower still, and when she finally lets herself look at him, she notices all the ways he’d changed over the last year: the broadness of his shoulders, the way his features finally start to fit the wholeness of him.

Rey only nods in response, not trusting her voice. She smiles too, and he smiles back, and Rey thinks she will never meet anyone more handsome.

•❖•

She begs him to tell her about his year, back in his home in Maine, even as she brushes off his requests for her to tell him all about _her_ year. She has not much to tell, really. The years have blurred into one, long, unchallenged routine of learning, of tedious History and Latin and sewing and piano. Of feeling unwanted in a large house controlled by adults that thought her not worth bothering about. Of feeling useless, restless, and all too out-of-place, as though every breath she breathed, she owed. She could never bore Ben of these details, lest he, too, discovered how little she was worth.

She’d much rather know everything that he’d been up to while he was away. Which he tells her of, for the next few hours. And in between, he had pulled out a deck of cards and showed her new tricks, which easily awed her.

Ben always did have the gift for illusion.

And when finally she tried to yawn, she glimpsed a softness in his eyes that made her feel warmer and terribly shy. 

He pulls his coat more firmly around her shoulders.

When he sees that she could no longer repeat to him the phrases he used, for she was already halfway to sleeping, Ben sneaks them out the house — the Solos were _very_ light sleepers, after all — and they walk slowly back to the Palpatine grounds in the dead of night, with a measly lamp to guide them. His steps are unhurried, as are hers. They trek across the two hills with mostly silence, Ben gripping her elbow to keep her walking straight whenever she yawns.

He frowns when she tells him that the only way back to her room is to go up the same way down: through the creeping vines that wove up the pipes along the East wall. 

He’d nearly knocked on the front door in his absolute disagreement at the idea, but the sky was turning its blue from navy to eggshell, and Rey insisted that he could absolutely _not_ wake anyone, _especially_ not her guardian, for she’d be in far more trouble than an accidental fall could give.

So she hoists herself up the first few feet, ambling up the way she’s practiced many times before. And when she reaches the top awning of the roof, she looks down at him.

He is gazing up at her, his hands in his pockets, with more of that softness that made her insides flutter. 

She waves goodbye, and he waves back. They do not shout. They do not need to.

Rey feels herself tethered to him, in the same manner she knows he is to her. And their silent smiles and warm eyes speak enough.

It is only once she is safe under the covers of her own bed, does she realise that she is still wearing his overlarge jacket.

•❖•

## 1885

Rey had been the West End’s golden girl for nearly all of last year’s season, but she was barely recognisable without her stage garb and glittery trappings. She did not feel the need for a disguise for tonight’s show.

And yet, it has been two hours and she _still_ can’t decide on what to wear.

“Oh, calm down. You cut a lovely sight in either,” Rose had commented, when Rey consulted her about which of two dresses she should go in: a navy blue, bustled number, or a dark green dress that was a bit less current, but cut her figure more flatteringly.

She could not tell Rose why it mattered so; she could barely admit it to herself.

In the end, she settled for the green dress, the last one she’d ever bought for herself, all the way from Paris. It had been two years, and the dress does not quite fit her as well as it did in her healthy measurements when she had bought it, but it was still acceptable for a night out at the theatre.

That evening right before the show, as the long line of people were being led inside the theatre, Rey is able to sneak inside from the backstage, avoiding the wings and creeping into somewhere in the third row orchestra, thanking Rose's friend Finneas for surreptitiously reserving a seat for her.

Something about being so close to the stage makes her palms sweat in their white kidskin gloves. She keeps her hands still on the skirts of her dress, the same way she tries to avoid thinking about the beating in her chest, as she waits for the show to start while the seats start to fill and the din of the gathering crowd start to sound restless and excited.

It has been ten years. But when has time ever helped?

Finally, a tall, rather stern-looking man takes the stage at the apron, and the excited murmurs of the crowd hush as he begins to introduce the anticipated magician.

“It has been said that there is no true magic, without real danger,” he tells them, his stiff accent carrying well even across a full house, “And tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to present the embodiment of that sentiment. We only ask that you refrain from spoiling the show amongst your friends once you leave this theatre bewitched and, dare I claim it…”

And here, he pauses for effect, letting a confident smirk grace one side of his face. Rey would roll her eyes, were she not the tiniest bit intrigued.

“... _transformed._ Ladies and gents, fresh from his American tour, after his many travels across the edge of the known world, into the farthest reaches of civil society, studying the Dark Arts that he may dazzle the world with its many wonders, may I present to you: _Lord Kyle O’Halloran!”_

Rey knows what she would like to be in this moment: unaffected and distant from a past far removed from her present. When the curtains open and he walks onto the stage, when she hears the applause, she pretends she is one with the sophisticated crowd, coming to watch a stranger to form an unbiased opinion about his performance. She claps with them.

But, upon seeing him from her little vantage point near the stage, Rey starts to realize that Benjamin Solo, the man she’d last seen nearly a decade ago, was nowhere in sight. In his place is a different creature altogether.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another update?? WHO IS SHE???
> 
> I have decided that Rey will always be a grimy little delinquent in any universe.
> 
> More baby reylo. But this is the last "baby" reylo. Next baby reylo will... not be so baby anymore. ;)
> 
> Thank you for reading! I hope this story brings you as much joy as I have in writing it. :) This has been a bit therapeutic for me, and comments would be so, so appreciated! <3


	4. something you’ve never seen before, pt. 2

_bury me beside you; i have no hope in solitude.  
and the world will follow to the earth down below_

•❖•

He emerges from the wings, and Rey could barely recognise his stride: the same long legs that had raced her uphill, or slowed their pace beside her own, or had awkwardly folded themselves in small spaces, now contained within them large, purposeful steps that brought him front and center. Rey watched, utterly transfixed at her Ben — _but no_ , he is not hers, not anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. 

He wore, as all great performers did, a garb that represented their brand of magic. But Rey had always thought him as a warm, alluring, amiable magician. He had always performed for her, in their youth, with smiles and laughter, and a glint in his eyes that held the mysteries of the universe with wonder.

Not so with him now.

He wears a strikingly long, dark overcoat, of a strange make and fashion that seemed to brand him as mystical and exotic; its sleeves flaring slightly at the ends, its patterned brocade material strewn with the subtlest red. Beneath the extravagant coat is a harsh leather waistcoat — a _choice,_ to be sure — as well as other dark layers: silk and linen, all of them in shades of black, save for his crisp white shirt. His attire is complemented by brass buttons and a similar watch chain, burnished into shiny rust-red where the light glints.

The effect is intimidating, and more than a little harsh for her liking.

But it is when he reaches the center stage at the fade of applause, that Rey gets a proper look at his face under the stage spotlight.

He is wearing a moustache and beard, and Rey cannot tell if it is put on for the stage, or if it is real. His hair is fuller, longer, down to his shoulders so that she cannot glimpse even the tips of the ears she’d once teased him mercilessly for, until she had grown too fond of them herself. When he stands before the stage, in front of a small, empty table, he stands straight and confident, his black-gloved hands clasped behind his back as he eyes his audience until all of the applause is glared out of them.

His features have grown into their fullness, and with no small amount of longing, Rey observes the gravity that his face brings; gone were the parts of him that seemed unsure of their place in the world, once upon a time. Gone is the young boy who made her fall in love with magic, and with him. The man that stands before her now is a man, indeed: his aquiline nose, his full lips in proportion to his massive, commanding frame. The spread of his shoulders, the carriage of his spine — all at once, Rey is assaulted with memories and grief, as though she had just gotten news that someone very dear to her has passed away.

She supposes that makes sense.

He is unrecognisable in nearly every manner, and it makes her heart hurt for reasons she does not want to examine too closely.

“Thank you for your warm welcome,” Ben — _Lord O’Halloran —_ says, his low voice all at once so familiar; Rey has to close her eyes to a shiver.

(It would seem that some things don’t change.)

“I must say, I was… hesitant to do this show, here in London,” he continues, and Rey is transfixed, observing everything. Unblinking. He smiles, just the barest hint of chuckling to himself, and Rey remembers that, too. “England has and always will hold a very special place in my heart. Not just because of you all _,_ coming here to see me, though that too has its many merits.” The audience laughs, and so does Rey. “But because I have had a long history when I came here often, on summers, when I was a boy.”

Rey can feel something thudding inside her. Something breakable and fragile, or something ticking and dangerous. Perhaps both.

He continues, seemingly unaffected, yet also personable; as though it was just him telling a story to a handful of people in a room. The effect is masterful, Rey observes. A trick of beguiling and well-practiced showmanship.

“Now, I would like to continue with an examination of history.”

At these words, he starts to make his way along the stage, while removing his left-hand glove. He tosses the black article into the air.

It comes back down in his hands as a small purple rubber ball.

The subtle flawlessness of the trick does not escape the audience, who are immediately attuned to his every movement. Rey is transfixed as well, but also to her own self, quietly simmering in a host of wild, unnamable emotions.

“History repeats itself. Like all principles of life,” he tells them as he walks calmly across the stage, playing with the rubber ball back and forth on his ungloved left hand, “it is a pattern of nature. It echoes and is recreated all around us; stories we’ve heard many times before. The tragic and the humorous,” he tells them as the ball tosses about his hands, “The hero and the villain,” he tells them as he bounces the ball on the floor once then twice, his other hand pocketed as he seems to inhabit a more casual demeanour. “The lover and the loved,” he says, but now holding the ball up in front of his audience, looking only at it, lost for a moment.

“In my travels, one of the questions I asked was how to rewrite history,” he tells them, speaking boldly again, back on stage from wherever he had temporarily receded into. He lets his sentence sink, lets his voice form the smallest echo. “There are many things I should like to re-do. And in my desperation for a way to change the past, I stumbled upon the future _._ ”

He comes to stand beside the small table in the middle of the stage. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, if you please.”

He gestures towards the center of the table, as though daring his audience to examine, to pick apart or understand anything more to the small wooden table with four skinny legs. But with a flick of his wrist, he throws the rubber ball right into the middle of it.

It does not bounce off. Instead, it seems to have disappeared as it hits the surface, not rolling down on it, not going through it. Simply disappearing into the study, flat surface, and nowhere to be found.

Rey’s sharp eyes does not miss the impossibility of the trick; it is hard to impress a seasoned magician like herself, but as she sits there as he performs the rest of the act — tilting the table to show its smooth and empty surface, before setting it right and miraculously changing its shape, then its color — she has to hand it to him:

He has become every bit the magician she had always known he would be.

•❖•

To her dismay, Rey is utterly captivated for the whole show.

From the moment he’d turned his glove into the purple rubber ball, she had sat at the edge of her seat. Certainly none of his tricks had been too difficult to piece together; there are only so many ways to pull a rabbit out of a hat. But his tricks had been markedly _him:_ ingenious, subversive. Almost _symbolic,_ with how he tied his acts with his monologues.

And his voice.

“Thank you, thank you. Please,” his smile is boyish, crinkling his mouth at the corners when the applause ceases to stop half-way through his show, after a particularly extravagant trick involving a mirror illusion and a member of the audience.

Rey shuts her eyes briefly, pretending that his low, familiar baritone does not do its own tricks on her, conjuring long-forgotten sensations and feelings across time and space. 

Instead, she tries to consider the beautiful stage assistant that has been helping him throughout: her tall, lithe body, fitted in performance garb that so sensually curved, for the distraction of the sternest observers: tight, tastefully diamond-patterned black and silver bodice, with her long, stockinged legs, and the coy demeanour of one who knows all eyes are on her most of the time. 

The beautiful object of dazzling misdirection, to complement the intimidating force that is the magician.

Rey considers how this woman works with him closely, has probably seen all his best tricks, and knows all his deepest professional secrets; she uses these unpleasant thoughts to curb her runaway nostalgia.

 _He’s certainly used to her presence,_ Rey observes with only the faintest taste of bile in her mouth, clapping along with the audience.

He gestures for the crowd to quiet, but some are so delighted that they’ve decided to give him a standing ovation; he sees this, and it makes him blush, his ungloved hands — for he had turned his right-hand glove into a raven that appeared beneath a gentleman's seat, in an earlier trick — clasping behind his back, ducking his head down as though to hide a terrible grin. His assistant claps for him as well. 

“You’re all too kind. Thank you.”

Then his eyes roam the audience for a brief few moments, and is Rey imagining it, or does he seem to be searching? For some strange reason, she bows her head away, her eyes cast downward as his eyes sweep her section.

It lasts for just a moment though, and he moves on to his next trick.

Rey bites the inside of her mouth as she gives applause.

She hadn’t quite known the risks of watching him tonight, but now she does.

With the increasing tempo of her heart, and the quiet bubbling of memories and repressed emotion at seeing him again, she most assuredly does.

•❖•

As his performance draws to a close, Rey holds her breath. 

She had read the reviews of him, sent to her by Herr Palpatine’s men all the way from across the pond. The performances of Lord Kyle O’Halloran were wondrous all throughout, but the final act… now _that_ was the one worth the full price of a ticket, and even twice as much in most cases.

Which is why Rey keeps time, anticipating the best for last. 

“Alas, I cannot entertain you all for the whole night, much as I would wish it,” he says, and the applause that followed his previous act turns into groans of dismay from the audience. A few hecklers yell their distaste of his performance having to end, and Rey feels her spine straighten, goosebumps cutting down her arms.

(This is rather terrible news for her own upcoming show, but all the same: she understands the crowd’s sentiment.)

He grins at the warm response something bashful, but all the more beautiful for it. A glimpse of the young man he had once been to her; it makes Rey feel things she'd rather not.

The subtle smile fades, however, when he looks up and regards his audience with a finality Rey knows would signal his last trick of the evening.

“As we come to a close, I would like to end with a word of caution: this next act is one that I do not recommend you to attempt, nor would I think it reproducible in any way.”

At his words, four stagehands emerge from the wings, each of them carrying a large, rectangular trunk. At once, Rey knows what type of trick he’s about to perform. She gasps quietly to herself, something inside her all of a sudden terrified.

There are three kinds of stage magicians: conjurers, illusionists, and escapists.

Rey is a conjurer: she utilises showmanship to distract and entertain, to bring out and make disappear. She is also occasionally an illusionist: the use of science and technology to perform far more mind-boggling tricks can be rewarding.

 _Escapists_ , however, are magicians of a completely different sort. 

Rey has heard of these types of tricks. She’s seen a few of them performed successfully.

But it is with a kind of unfamiliar panic that she watches him remove his long overcoat with assistance, before unbuttoning his cuffs, continuing to speak to his audience. “Magic is an act of defiance. Against the laws of nature and our very own logic and perceptions,” he says as he continues to strip himself down: unbuttoning his waistcoat, removing his necktie, folding his shirtsleeves up his pale, sinewed forearms. 

Rey’s breath hitches; whether it’s from nerves or from an excitement of a different sort, she knows not in the moment.

“Tonight, we have examined history, space, and time. Life and death,” he tells them casually, even as he disrobes before them, while his stagehands work behind him, and his assistant takes his articles of clothing as they are discarded one by one. The audience is completely silent, hanging on his every movement.

Rey can feel her heart hammering with terrifying ferocity. 

“For my final act,” he says, once he has removed his shoes, and he’s standing on-stage in only the barest minimum of propriety: his white shirt with his sleeves rolled up, his suspended black trousers, his socks. His figure cuts a contrast against the rest of the unlit vastness of the theatre; it holds its own against the darkness, and Rey's throat feels impossibly raspy. “I would like to examine one last thing.”

Out of nowhere, his assistant brings forth a complicated contraption of chains. They clatter heavily across the stage, the clinking of metal to metal, and Rey can feel the audience’s anticipation rippling through her.

The assistant gives him the bulk of the chains to hold in both of his outstretched hands, and then proceeds to fasten the ends of it on his limbs, starting with his ankles.

“That which I would like to examine in my final act, is love,” he tells them, even as his stagehands come down to grab volunteers from the audience, whoever would be willing to come onstage to inspect his entrapment.

Against her better judgement, Rey stands up and follows, as though in a trance. 

He continues to monologue as a few members of the audience make their way up the stage, including Rey. He stands there stiffly as his assistant proceeds to fasten the chains about him:

“Love, like magic, is an act of defiance. It goes against all reason. It defies and contradicts even itself. And in the end, even when it seems impossible, love _always_ triumphs.”

His assistant finishes with the clink of the lock around his wrists, and gestures for the audience members to inspect the chains wrapped around his torso, around his wrists, and linked to his ankles, severely limiting his movement.

“I can assure you all, they’re quite real,” he comments as one gentleman gives a particularly sharp tug and he is jolted, despite how he stands nearly a head taller than everyone else. The audience chuckles.

Rey stands rather distantly from everyone else, keeping close to the side of the stage. Waiting, perhaps, for her wits to return to her as she watches the audience inspect him, one by one, under the harsh spotlight. Soon, it is her turn, and she hears him continue, but only vaguely, before she makes her way towards him in slow, even steps.

“I stand here before you all, a bound man. You could say that I am a man in the chains of this terrible affliction we call love, and that these restraints represent love’s impossibilities. This trunk is the inevitability of—”

But he does not finish his sentence. It sputters out as his eyes lock on hers.

For Rey is before him now, being one of the last people on stage. His words seem to die the moment he registers her, backlit as she is by the strong spotlights.

The small gasp she makes at his closeness is coincidental.

Time stretches, perhaps for moments too long, perhaps for only a blink, but she recovers quickly and moves to touch the metal with her gloved hands, seemingly only checking on the locks.

She does _not_ mean to brush his fingers.

And as she scuttles away quickly so that the show may resume, studiously avoiding the depth of his stage-lit, grey-hazel eyes, she reassures herself that he had not meant to tug on her fingertips either.

She barely hears the stuttered, disconnected way he resumes his monologue. The sound of her heart and her breathing have commandeered all her senses, until she is nothing more than an incoherent jangle of nerves when she returns to her seat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm tired and sad and have been crying all the damn time bec of the lockdown, but i hope this little thing gives you all a bit of joy. <3 i haven't been feeling quite so well, so i'm not sure how often i can keep up this fast update schedule. :(
> 
> please be safe, be kind. comments are always lovely to get :) if you can, please please sign petitions for Breonna Taylor.
> 
> love you all, thank you so much for reading it really does mean so much to me :'(


	5. an inconvenient truth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW:
> 
> A young woman starts to discover sexuality here. This fic is rated E for reasons. :) Please mind the tags! <3

_we are watching apparitions of ourselves_ _  
__two inventions with no earthly tongues to tell_   
still suspected, we lay the surface to repel off of

•❖•

In the end, she should have expected nothing less.

He had been bound — chained from wrists to ankles to torso — then made to squat and squeeze himself in a clearly heavy, too-small, leather, velvet-lined trunk that was shown to be completely empty. The audience gasped when the lid was shut then locked with a click, the keys dangling from the fingers of the pretty assistant.

A big hirsute man — even larger than the magician himself; a feat, certainly, were he not garbed in the familiar exotic trappings of Lord O’Halloran — emerged moments later onto the stage, carrying a hammer on his shoulders.

He proves the hammer’s weight by bringing it down upon a melon on the floor for all to see, provided by another stage hand.

The audience gasps, and no sooner had they recovered from the fruit’s explosion that the giant is already swinging the hammer over his head…

And bringing it promptly down on the trunk.

The audience goes _wild_ with utter disbelief, gasps and murmurs ringing all around.

Rey heart stops, her hand coming up to her chest; her breathing stilled.

The hammer dents loudly upon the trunk, but the giant swings it down _again,_ to the immense terror and shrieking of a traumatised audience. Several women had even begun to faint.

The lid of the trunk began to concave and fall into itself, the trunk now misshapen by the blows, as would anything inside it be. The man tilts the heavy trunk to open towards the audience, as the assistant crouched down to unlock the lid. 

Rey reminds herself that it was all an act, that it was all merely a play on the audience’s emotions, and soon enough, she hears a loud, low voice echoing around the theatre:

“But Love is stronger than its impossibilities,” the disembodied voice says, before the assistant opens the deformed lid… to the red velvet lining of an empty trunk.

Predictably, the audience gasps and start to clap, but not before the spotlight turns abruptly upwards, training the audience’s eyes to the second balcony, where a victorious magician emerges: “And Love, ladies and gentlemen, conquers all.”

The crowd goes wild with applause. Lord O’Halloran — _Ben,_ Rey finds herself calling him even as the intensity of that last trick had brought stinging to the corners of her eyes — takes a humble bow, before bidding his standing ovation goodnight.

He does not stay to bask in their applause, nor does he soak in the excesses of his successful first preview.

He simply gives them all a perfunctory nod, before disappearing.

•❖•

## 1874

“What would you say is the best part of Maine?”

“The best part?”

“Yes. Your favorite part.”

He twists his mouth in thought, working the King of Spades around his fingers in smooth, practiced movement. The rest of the cards are spread before him on the uneven ground, some weighed down against the perpetual wind by small pebbles. He does not look up from them while he considers her question.

“I don’t know,” he tells her, flipping his wrist into a Jack of Diamonds. “There’s not much to be attached to.”

“Not the weather?”

He throws a grimace over his shoulder at her teasing. She smirks.

“The lighthouses, perhaps. Or the library,” he says, switching two of the cards before him.

Rey rests the open Keats book on her chest. Her back is starting to ache from how it curves in her recline against the oak tree, but she is far too lazy to adjust.

She watches his hand, the way the playing card cuts the air as it dances. His mindless command of it is mesmerising, even a little enviable; she would pluck it from him on impulse, were it not for her comfortable, spine-deforming spot beneath the tree.

He is sitting on the ground near her skirts, his back to her; he leans over to shift a few cards, and Rey’s eyes are drawn to the way his shoulders stretch against the fabric of his jacket. They move down where his sleeves stretch, working their worth, folded and bunched up to reveal the pale skin of his forearms.

It is ridiculous, how the whole of him — for he grew even more over the last year; taller, larger, with no traces of the gangly boy she used to race uphill — can fold so neatly into gentle angles.

(She had overheard some of the new house maids tittering about the “established young gentleman” from the neighbouring estate, and their speculative admiration of his assets and his worth and his suitability for marriage… and _other things_.)

Rey’s cheeks warm, mortified by her thoughts. Of how those arms might feel around her waist… _and other things._

“The one you have at home?” she asks, turning back to her book in quiet indignity.

“Yes.” A card nearly flies out from a gust; his hand snatches it back, barely glancing up as he glares at the spread before him. He is forming a new trick in his mind’s eye, she knows. Briefly, she wishes she were a trick, instead of a flesh-and-blood young woman of sixteen years.

She resents herself a little for being jealous of a trick. But only a little.

After all: Rey had never been taught the rules of society.

She had been educated, certainly, of academic subject matters fit for a young lady of good upbringing, but that was the extent of her education: rigid instruction from an unfeeling tutor, who reprimanded more than he instructed. What little Rey knows of social relations and propriety, she had to piece together from the reticent house staff who always kept an eye out for her sneaking around, lest they be caught associating too fondly with the young mistress.

Herr Palpatine did not take very kindly to Rey befriending anyone.

He was a strange old man, her guardian. He did not treat her like a ward, nor did he seem to give much thought to Rey’s existence in general. She rather felt more like a curtain, or a decorative marble bust on a pedestal in the halls. A human stain living on the Herr's properties; she was also often reminded — especially when she had been younger and fresh from the streets — that her wardship was conditional, and that she could be back in St. Jackson’s if she was so inclined to be disagreeable.

Since her wardship, Rey found it easy enough to comply, from autumn to spring. She had grown up on the streets; of course she knew how to play it safe. She knew when the servants were turning their heads, she knew when they were not. Her general living situations had improved greatly since being taken in by her guardian, and she would not risk losing food in her belly and a warm place to sleep in, for anything.

Except, of course, in the summer.

Often, the Herr would be off on business for most of this season, and Rey — every summer since she was thirteen — would be out and about, spending her time with the only friend she had.

It was risky, certainly, but she played her odds well, and had been successful in keeping her only friendship a secret.

Ben, too, had spoken to her after that one evening in his room, that she was _never_ to visit him such a way again, if she wanted to keep being his friend.

Rey had been deeply hurt, and had demanded he explain whatever for, and he sighed and scrubbed his hair back from his face and had told her that, had they been found out, it would have required their respective families to impose severe consequences for _impropriety_.

To which, Rey had blushed severely and realised her grave mistake.

How little she truly knew of the world.

Which is why how they've come to consider the countryside as their playground, of sorts.

Their current knoll is a fair way from both their homes; it is their unspoken meeting place this summer, this grassy little hill with the old oak, where Rey might pretend to visit without needing to feel small for asking him if he would be there come that afternoon.

She had not asked him to join her, as she had learned that year — by way of a story from Tallie, one of the scullery maids — to never ask for a man’s time, lest he be put off by her presumptions. 

So, she would bring her overworn John Keats, or her sketch-book, or a basket of sandwiches and perhaps a deck of cards. Prepared, always, to spend her time meaningfully. Prepared to be without his presence, for she had never asked him, that summer. To meet, that is.

He is always there anyway.

Nearly every day that June, he is there before her, with his own play-things: his purple rubber ball, a book, a trick device he might be tinkering with, such as a small box with a secret compartment. He’d once been there playing with a pup, and Rey squealed from afar at the rare sight of such an animal — for her guardian was strict with rules about animals in the estate — and had run so fast up the knoll that she had tumbled over her skirts and dropped her basket of bread and cheese and eggs.

Sometimes, she is there before him. But this has happened only rarely, and at the sight of the tree and no-one nearby, Rey would feel the stirrings of unnamable dejection. Of the not knowing and the not having, hanging over her head like a stormy cloud.

On one such occasion of arriving at an empty knoll, early on in the month — and at the heels of a day that had been less than pleasant — she had felt so utterly convinced that he would not be coming at all, and this had fed in her a darkness of thought that found her vision blurring while she read her book beneath the oak that afternoon.

She does not like to think of people leaving, or of being left.

She does not like to remember the orphanage, and the workhouse before that. She does not enjoy navigating the possibility of displeasing her guardian, enough for him to send her back. 

But most of all, she cannot bear the thought of Ben — _dearest Ben,_ her only friend and companion in the whole world — one day leaving her to find better friends and companions wherever else life would bring him.

(He had arrived later that same afternoon anyway, and had been distressed at seeing her tear-streaked face. Ben had rushed to her side and had asked her what the matter was, and Rey shut the book quickly and murmured that it had been a rather sad story; she tucked the book away beneath her skirts, lest he suspected she’d been crying because of Plato's _Republic_.

They had spent that afternoon wandering the nearby woods, at his suggestion, as he named to her the different birds by how they sang.)

Rey remembers that day, because she can still feel the ghost of his hand at the small of her back; the brief brushes of his fingers against her knuckles. 

One season. She has but one season with him every year, and it is the most she can have, and yet, Rey is starting to feel that it will never be enough.

This selfishness makes her feel sick, but she can be honest, at least.

“Ben?”

Her voice is small, thoughtful, and nearly lost to the wind, but he hears her anyway: he hums his reply, but does not look up from where he reconfigures the spread of the cards before him.

“Will you forget me?”

He still does not look up, lost in his focus. “Forget your what?” he asks as he picks up and plays with a Jack of Hearts.

As though from somewhere outside her body — her body, which had begun to bloom and blossom in places that frightened her; her body, as explained by textbooks and servants, made for pain and pleasure and possession; her body, the very one that is recently starting to feel too small and cramped for her heart — Rey finds the words to ask what she’s always been afraid to know the answer to:

“Will you forget about me, someday?”

As soon as the words are out of her mouth, Rey wishes a particularly strong wind would blow them into non-existence. He turns to her then, his hair whipped about his face, with a very bemused knit to his brows.

But there’s amusement playing in his eyes, too. A quirk to his lips that Rey decidedly hates.

She turns back to the book in front of her, irritated and breathless and perhaps rather hating herself a little bit.

“Rey.”

She does not look up. Merely hums, as though she’d forgotten the question he had not yet answered. Perhaps trying to hide the warming of her cheeks.

“ _Rey._ ”

She squints at the printed words in front of her, frowning in all appearance of concentration: 

_He has his Summer, when luxuriously_

_Spring's honied cud of youthful thought he loves_

_To ruminate, and by such dreaming high_

_Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves…_

He sighs and gathers all the cards before him into a whole deck, and Rey watches — secretly, with her eyes just barely peeking from above her book — as a reservation inhabits him; a soft, honeyed slowness that meant he was ruminating a secret he was rather fond of. 

For secrets were his life, and she knew that.

And she had secrets of her own, certainly, but her secrets were small, unworthy things. They were insignificant creatures, messy and unformed; grandiose daydreams or silly wishes, a vague trick in her mind, or the nebulous desire for something bigger.

But sometimes, her secrets were also dark things. And all the more dangerous for their darkness: they were deep, heaving breaths in the night, and the imagination of solid arms that wrapped around her. They were black hair and pale skin and lovely lips that touched her own and plied her open. They were sensations too strong to bear, she felt stifled in her own clothes.

They were the ghosts of a hand at the small of her back; the brief brushes of fingers against her knuckles.

(“‘S no matter, young miss. You’re jus’ blooming,'' Jess, one of the friendlier house staff, had said one autumn evening, chuckling at her when she had rushed to the maid’s quarters, asking about strange, tactile dreams that had made her feel so odd upon waking, she had thought she was turning sick. Rey did not understand what Jess had meant, upon telling her to simply “explore to scratch the itch”, until she did just that under the covers of her bed that night. It was then that she had chanced about the dark pleasure of her own fingers, and the even darker pleasure of thoughts about a certain young man she knew very well. 

And how he might see her, in that moment: ragged and sweating, her hips stuttering into the down of her bed, her chemise riding up beneath the covers. How he might feel, hovered over her, his large body draped from behind, taking her hand by the wrist to remove it, that he might touch her belly, and slowly move down, down to the soft curls at her center, and even further, to caress the wetness of her slit with his own fingers — just like the way she’d heard the house staff trade stories of their lovers, when they thought she wasn’t listening.

And Rey would shudder at her own fingers and imagination, thinking about how he might kiss the back of her neck. How he might smile, or laugh, or have heaving breaths of his own. How he might see her now as something worthwhile, beyond the shared love of magic they had as children.)

Rey’s secrets were wet, and wild, and pedestrian. They were small, dark, _deeply unworthy_ things.

It would be the height of absurdity to think that Ben’s secrets would be anywhere near as… pathetic, as her own.

No, Ben’s secrets were most certainly no small things. His secrets would be fascinating, alluring, important. They were the secrets of kings and lineages and old wars and old houses and old, forgotten tricks. They will always be better than hers.

Because when Rey looked at him, as she does so now from behind her book, she knows that Ben _is_ better. He is the finest form of gentleman, born of worth and standing. It hadn’t been difficult to piece together his nobility— it was all there, in the books that he read and the high society he disdained and the grandfather he was so hesitant to speak of.

(Not quite like a “mere orphan plucked from the dregs of Whitechapel, and easily returned”, as her guardian did not tire of subtly reminding her.)

Rey is brought out of her musings when, out of nowhere, Ben is shifting in his spot, moving closer and turning to face her with one of his relentlessly _insufferable_ expressions. His arms drape over his folded knees, the picture of patience.

She huffs. Hides her face behind the book: “Oh, don't look at me like that, it’s a perfectly reasonable question—”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Well, you didn’t have to! You could just… ignore me, if you please—”

“ _Rey._ ”

“It matters not—”

“Would you look at me?”

She quells the beginnings of her embarrassment and forces a glare from above the line of her hardcover: “What I _meant,_ was—” she says, grinding her teeth and setting the open book on her chest, and what _had_ she meant, anyway? Rey cannot for the life of her pick up the thread of thought — or emotion — that had brought out such a question.

Not when he was looking at her like that. Not when she was feeling pleasantly suffocated under the weight of his full attention.

“Say it. What did you mean?” he asks, and _oh,_ she hates the teasing in it. She rolls her eyes, and straightens up with an idea:

“Well, who’s to say? Perhaps one day we’ll _both_ forget each other, you and I—”

He scoffs. “ _Right_.”

“—and when you’re back in America, you might tire of summers here. Don’t tell me you’ve not thought of pursuing your stagecraft. I _know_ it’s all you think about and—”

“It isn’t.” 

“—one day, maybe not so far from now, you’ll be in Boston or New York and too busy or, or—”

Rey yelps in ticklish surprise when his hand strikes fast to the corner of her neck, pulling out a silver coin. He shows it to her:

“Toss for it. Heads, I won’t forget you. Tails, we can… we’ll make a pact about forgetting.”

“What kind of pact?”

“The kind that holds consequences for forgetting.”

Excitement bubbles up in Rey as she properly sits up and sets her book aside. “What kind of consequences?” she squints at him.

He returns the mischief twice over in his pursed lips. “Whatever you want.”

Rey takes a moment to think, really think, about what would be the worst thing in the world to ask him to give up. The most dire consequence for them both. It doesn’t take long before her mind’s made up:

“We should just make the pact right now,” she tells him, holding out her pinky finger. “If we ever forget the other person, then the offending party must give up their biggest secret. And I do mean _the most important secret_ that they have ever held, in their life, up to that point.”

She has half a thought that he _would never,_ but she is instead surprised by his laughter and the way his much larger pinky wraps around hers and tightens.

“Alright, _Miss Naiman,”_ he says. “That’s a pact. But I still want to toss for it.”

The way he says it — and the way his finger does not unwrap from hers — does something terrible to her insides. She can only nod, held fast by eyes warmed by the afternoon sun.

He flips the coin, catches it in his palm and overturns it on the back of her other hand.

Rey does not know why the sight of the Queen’s profile makes her smile. But instinct has her plucking the coin and discovering, to her infinite amusement, that it is a double-headed coin. She looks at Ben with the most accusing glare she can muster, despite the impossible warmth and affection that she is nearly bursting with.

“What’s this, then?” she asks, incredulous that he had used a trick coin, turning it over her fingers.

He does not look at her, and gives the distinct impression that he _cannot_ look at her, with the glaringly red tips of his ears, and the flush that has appeared on his cheeks. He keeps his eyes to the sun. The hazel of them are a faraway red-gold, and Rey knows he is back to pondering a most beloved secret.

“It’s a promise,” he says. 

•❖•

## 1885

Rey doesn’t know what causes her to linger backstage, after the show.

The backstage of his theatre — for that is what the Millennium will be for the remainder of the run: _his_ , through and through — felt damp with the performance; the sweat of the interim dancers, the to-and-fro rush of stage hands, and the tail end of sweeping and putting away and tidying up, so that all with be in order for the next evening. The hustle is quite familiar; she herself would be amidst it, some weeks from now.

But that was earlier. Now, the backstage is barely lit, with only the last dredges of the evening’s performers dressed up and heading home. 

She can hear the last few people, voices around the corner, murmuring their private conversations even as she hides herself away, waiting for a moment.

But a moment for what, she is not so certain of yet. 

The voices are muffled enough for Rey to studiously avoid listening in; she’s curious, but she isn’t quite so ill-mannered as to eavesdrop. There is something insidious about preying on the secrets of their profession, and there are some lines Rey is loath to cross.

She hears a feminine _Au revoir!_ thrown over the shoulder as the pretty assistant — _of course_ she’d be one of the last to leave — brushes past Rey one her way out, wearing a far more decent attire to head home in.

All at once, the ridiculousness of what she’s doing dawns on her, and she has half a mind to make a mad sprint for the exit, when the remaining voices draw closer and louder, as though finally having an overdue argument now that they thought they were alone. 

“ _No,_ no, no, none of that, Benjamin, we _both_ know you lost it mid-trick—”

“Didn't realise we were being prissy tonight. And it was _nothing—_ ”

“Bloody—if _I_ saw you from the far wings seizing up, you can bet your best tricks there’ll be blokes in the second and third rows who’re—!”

The exasperated man loses his train of thought: Rey makes her presence known, emerging from the shadows of the stage curtains. Her gaze flits from the red-head man to Ben, through the mirror.

She would gasp, were her lungs not holding her breath hostage;

He has removed most of his stage garb, and all that is left are his rolled-up shirtsleeves and clean-shaven face — so the beard _was_ put on for show — and the slightly disheveled waves of his hair, as though he’d been running his hand through them.

He seems to freeze, staring at her in the reflection, before standing up in measured movements, turning to face her.

At long last, face to face with him in this way, Rey fights hard against the weight of the years bearing down on her; to do what, she does not know, but she feels any impulsiveness would be regrettable. She _must_ be composed.

“Who’re you? How’d you get back here?” the stern man asked, but Ben answers for her:

“Rachel Naiman.”

At the same time, she says: “Just an admirer.”

“You can’t be here—”

“It’s alright, Armitage, she’s… an old friend,” he says, but does not glance at the man he is addressing. Rather, his eyes are on hers and remain on hers, and much like their childhood, this first encounter after so long bears the hallmark rivalry they have so keenly honed between them.

“I won’t take long,” she adds, holding his gaze just the same. Unwilling to be the first to look away.

The third man in the room might as well have disappeared; indeed he does so, murmuring after a few laden moments that he’ll leave them to it, as he dons his hat and heads out.

At their being alone, Rey can finally feel a semblance of calm.

And she _must_ be calm; there’s no need to let him win this round.

So she gathers her courage with a deep breath and determines to be as professional and _unaffected_ as could possibly be, despite him standing before her: large and looming, filling out his pristinely white shirt, taking up far too much space than was strictly necessary, in her opinion.

Alas:

“Mr. O’Halloran,” she says, and good God _,_ did her voice sound breathy _._ Rey winces on the inside. 

“Miss Naiman.”

To her relief, he does not sound to be faring much better.

“I wanted to drop by personally to congratulate you on your first night’s preview,” she tells him, seizing control of her tone. Despite her fingers twitching in her gloves.

“Is that so?”

He makes to move towards her, and Rey, of all her knowledge of him, cannot place the look in his eyes.

“Yes, that _is_ so, given that you and I are to be running scheduled shows across each other this season.”

“Did you like it? The show, I mean.”

She is taken aback by his question, and the oddly sincere shift in his expression.

“I—I did. Yes. I liked the show very much,” she says, and she doesn't know what brings her to such candour in front of him, but the words come out of her in small near-whispers anyway. “You’re—you were quite good.”

It is a tricky, almost painful admission. But there’s no reason to be affected by the truth.

She’ll just have to work doubly hard in the next two weeks, that is all.

She smiles at him, despite the tight feeling in her chest. “I daresay, you’ll have a great run, and I wanted to...” words escape her for a moment, “...congratulate you. From one magician to another,” she finishes, steeling herself and letting the faux confidence gird her words.

She holds out her hand for him to shake. Professional.

He looks down at her hand, frowning briefly, and then he is suddenly thrown into a fit of restrained chuckles, his hands coming up to his hips as he shakes his head to himself. As though enjoying a private joke. She sees him work his tongue behind his crooked teeth, the curl of a smile held back.

It’s a bit annoying.

“Do I amuse you?” She takes back her outstretched hand in offense, a traitorous smile challenging the corner of her mouth.

“Not at all,” he says, his hand coming up to touch his bottom lip in mirth. “Not at all. You just… You haven’t changed.”

There is something elusive reaching out to her, in the glint of his eyes, in the relaxed hunch of his shoulders. Something she doesn’t understand. 

Something she is in danger of falling for.

“ _You_ have,” she says instead. Quiet. Receding.

Between this, and her admission of his brilliance, she tells him the truth. No matter how sinking and awful it feels, that he is, once again, still better.

Being here is a mistake _._

“Good night, Mr. O’Halloran.” She turns to go — would like nothing more than to flee — but his hand on her wrist stills her.

“Miss N _—Rey_ , wait. Please.”

She turns back to him expectantly, one raised brow daring him on, because haven’t they always contradicted each other? Is that not their lot in life? There had been a time when Rey thought that perhaps it was all they had been made to do.

His unstoppable force to her immovable object.

But he stands before her now, and Rey can’t piece together why he doesn’t seem to know what to say, his hands hovering around his sides, unsure how to exist.

“I—what part? Of the show, I mean. Which, uh—which parts did you like?”

 _You,_ she doesn’t say, and scoffs instead. “You’re asking?”

“You’d enjoy giving me constructive criticism—”

“I would if there had been anything to construct! You want me to say it, don’t you?” Rey bites her lip, vexed beyond proportion. “The show was very good. It was—it was more than that. It was bloody _fantastic._ It’s easily one of the best I’ve ever seen, and frankly, it would be perfect _,_ had I not known you and your—your habit of gloating. There, that’s my criticism. Does that satisfy you?”

She is so bent on scathing him that she is seized too late by his sudden closeness, the way his presence drapes over her, and she has to tilt her head up to catch the look in his eyes:

A somber, sad look that makes her think of her own decade of longing. Of wanting — of unbearable, heart-wrecked _wanting —_ and living with the truth of being unwanted.

“No. Not even a little bit, no,” he tells her, and the depth of his voice grates against her spine in an upward caress.

She stands her ground, defiant even against the memories of him ransacking her mind. Chin up, she holds his gaze — the questioning, pensive downwardness of it — and shows him that she is no longer the girl he’d once known.

To her satisfaction, at the very least, he seems to hold his breath as well. She does not miss the way he seems to puzzle over her, the way his eyes roam her face, perhaps for some clue, some giveaway of affections long forgotten.

Rey will die before she’ll let him find even the smallest hint. 

Finally, he looks away. And Rey, for all her posturing, does not miss the small bob at his throat, the dark circles under his eyes, the small sigh. The tiredness, washing out the magic.

So taken is Rey by his apparent change of demeanour that she does not move when she feels him gently take her left hand, slowly unbuttoning her glove and pulling on each finger, one by one, until the white leather slips down her skin and the glove comes off.

There is a hesitating moment, wherein he looks at her, as though asking for permission, before he wordlessly pockets the article before she could so much as exhale.

Rey dares not think. Dares not speak, nor move; there is nothing left. 

“What happened here?” he asks, so close that she could almost hear the catch of his breath. Rey musters enough presence of mind to look down, where a section of her palm has been bandaged from earlier, with her incident with the wire cutters. He touches where the bandage wraps. His fingertips graces the contours of hers.

“Nothing. Just a—an accident. In my workshop.”

She observes the line of his brows as he looks down at where he is holding her hand. At once, she knows — can almost _feel_ — how sad he is. And even ten years removed from her first love of him, she finds herself still longing to soothe, while his large fingers behold her calloused ones in soft touches.

The moment holds them in a glass cage, filled to the brim with summers spent in each others’ spaces; the comfort of two bodies in long-forgotten orbits, finding themselves in the same gravity once again.

She watches, bewitched, as he seems to ponder some grief. 

_Why are you hurting? Why must I see you so sad? Will you tell me all that has happened in the years since?_

_Or will you keep your secrets, just as you always have?_

Rey doesn’t have time to feel the surge of ache, before he is slowly bringing her small hand up to his mouth, pressing his lips to a bare spot on her knuckle, eyes on hers.

She forgets to breathe.

“Mr. O’Halloran—”

“You don’t have to call me that.”

The words brush past the skin of her hand.

And stokes the flames of her panicked irritation.

“With respect, _Mr. O’Halloran_ ,” she tells him bitterly, brokenly, plucking her hand from him, no longer keeping up the pretence of detachment. “Yes, I do.”

And with that, Rey turns on her heels, grips her skirts, and bounds out in a barely-respectable brisk walk. If she had felt him go after her, if she had heard him calling out her name, she was hardly given to care.

She runs out of the theatre and heads home, tucking her ungloved hand beneath the other in the folds of her dress, and it is not until she’s locking herself up in her cramped flat — her breaths ragged, her heart racing — does she let herself face her mistake:

The knowledge that the years have not dulled her affection for him hits her with a wave of nausea.

Trembling all over, she looks down at her hands: one gloved, one not.

Frustration crawls up her throat; she unbuttons her other glove and slaps the offending material onto her workshop table before propping herself up against its edge. She can feel her breaths, loose and ragged in her ribcage. She can feel her body humming with pent-up energy.

 _No,_ Rey resolves. _No, this will not do._

Herr Palpatine said it best: he is her rival. The greatest threat to her professional success. She will _not_ be undone by a pair of pretty eyes, no matter their history. And if she still feels ache after all these years, what does it matter? He’s always wanted her to have secrets of her own.

With this final thought, Rey lights a lamp and settles down for a sleepless night, pen and paper in hand, ready to sketch.

She has much to work on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love me some Explicit Hand-Holding and Sexy De-Gloving. :) Choo-choo, let's get on this Angst!!!
> 
> ;) come yell at me on twitter: reyreyalltheway


	6. what the water gave me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LMAO once again, historians are advised to look away.
> 
> i am sorry this took so long! <3 here have some... *reads scribble in palms* wet horn knee teenagers. 
> 
> posted with very little edits bec if i stand to wait another day before posting this i will lose my courage again lol. pls forgive any mistakes, i promise i will return to this with fervour for missing letters and the uncannily semi-regular misspelling of the word "crisp".

_i'll be your friend in the daylight again;_ _  
__there we will be, like an old enemy._

•❖•

## 1875

At seventeen, Rey falls in love.

Only it is not so much a falling as it is the helpless plunging into depths, and for a moment, the world is submerged and there is nothing but the breathlessness. 

~.:.~

The end of summer brought with it strange rains; the riverbank would be muddy. The sky is dull with a late and navy twilight that seemed to beckon to her idea, rather than contradict it. Sunrise would come soon, but until then, it would have no say in the matter.

Light tended to colour things falsely.

She disembarks from her horse quickly when she can just almost see the shimmering outline of dark water, moonlit on the canvas of familiar landscapes.

Her heart races. Sprinting away from the thoughts that give it chase. 

Her bare feet slip in the dew-damp grass; fast, stumbling steps in her haste towards the riverbank. She removes her riding habit as she does so, then her scarf, violently, her limbs itchy with restlessness; she unbuttons her overlarge shirt with cold, small fingers that nearly tear into the seams, trembling as they are. She removes her breeches — her own make — until she is stripped down to her drawers and chemise, the rest of her clothes in a scatter by the river.

She unwraps the rope around her wrist.

She had pillaged it from the stables when she took the horse. It is the thinnest she could find, but is much longer than she would like. It would have to do.

(She takes a steadying breath, but only once.)

With her teeth and much focus, she starts to bind herself.

The memory of the knot comes easily; she has been running through a lot of them the whole year. The langford double loops around her wrists, tight and secure;

There is no magic without risk. No skill without danger.

(The old journal hidden beneath her bed had been detailed; an ugly reminder that her magic is learned, and unnatural, and that it does not belong to her, the way it belongs to him.)

She pulls on an end of the rope with her teeth. The fibers bite into the skin of her wrists, the extra length dangles up to her knees. She is shivering, and she cannot stop shivering.

(In a brief flash of closed eyes, he is there. Beautiful, powerful. Important. A monument to everything she wishes she could be; 

The sound of wanting stirs behind her breastbone.

The wanting threatens to spill, the pointed end of it like a blade at her throat, hissing and angry.

Rey chokes it down.)

She walks straight into the river and into the water. 

The brush of cold against her skin licks goosebumps up from her ankles to her nape; she shivers, and _finally,_ finally she can immerse in sensation. Unthinking, she walks on and on, deeper and deeper still, until her toes barely touch the soft silt of the riverbed. Until her head is barely above water. Until her bound hands feel dangerous enough. Just enough, for this exercise to be worthwhile.

Her teeth chatter. She closes her eyes.

If she stretched her legs and pointed her toes, she could feel the riverbed.

She bobs her head, sinks down, curls her body to submerge fully, and concentrates; her exhales bubble underwater, but tugging at the rope around her wrists does nothing except exhaust her, until she runs out of breath.

Her head bobbles up over the waterline once more; she sputters, wipes the hair and water from her eyes even as she struggles, swallowing mouthfuls of river. Kicking her way towards the shallows a bit more, that she can feel the riverbed against her toes again.

(Her body is rippling with energy, warmed by her attempts at escape, but _No, this would not do_ , she thinks, disappointment and bitterness warring inside her. _Not good enough, not good enough..._ )

An idea seizes her. She turns to look at the rest of the body of water, stretched out like infinite blackness under the pre-dawn sky.

Rey breathes, her feet brushing the riverbed every once in a while; in, out, and in once more.

Then she relaxes and lies down, and lets her body lift up to the surface, floating.

For a while, she steals a period of blissful blankness, her eyes closed, hands and rope resting against her abdomen, her body submerged and shaking with tremors, content to let the gentle flow bring her wherever it will. Content to feel her own, if only for just a moment. Content to lose sight of the shallows.

The water will give her this, at least. If it cannot give her anything else, if she cannot take from it anything else today, it will give her this.

Her ears are beneath the waterline, and she only hears the distant gurgling of a splash from afar. She does not want to pay heed to it, but it draws closer anyway. Disturbs her anyway.

She gasps when something grasps her ankle. 

Rey has never learned to tread water.

Perhaps that was the point of this exercise. The desire to draw the danger in, to bask in it, and perhaps overcome something real. No good trick is played safe. No good trick comes without cost.

She makes to kick and stand up, but her feet cycle underwater and hit no ground, and with the elusive riverbed, she starts to panic, her limbs flailing, her bound wrists unhelpful, her head barely able to stay afloat, her mouth swallowing lungfuls of river.

(The danger washes over her, again and again; _risk, reward, risk, reward, am I good enough? Not good enough, not fast enough, not enough..._ )

A body draws itself closer and Rey instinctively finds shoulders to clutch on; her hands grasping desperately as she gasps sputtering, waterlogged breaths when her head bobs about.

She glimpses black hair as an arm comes up around her waist, and pulls her towards him. The dawn is yet, but not dark enough to hide the frown in his brows as he wipes the hair off of her face.

Even in the low light, she sees his eyes: anger, worry. Despair.

She looks away.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you, sweetheart...”

He murmurs the words with difficulty, what with him supporting both their bodies. He lets her breathe, lets her swipe the water off her face, before asking if she’s ready to kick and swim towards shore. She nods.

He grasps her hands. He swims, pulling them back to the riverbank. He is a powerful swimmer, but Rey had floated a good distance away from the shallows.

( _Not good enough. Never good enough._ )

The moment her feet find ground, she lets go of his hand. Walks out of the river on her own, her body ungainly, slogging through the unnatural thick of tension between them. Turning the other way, when he tries to come near.

The weight of the water drags against her garments, her legs sopping into the silt as she steps, cold seeping through the clung fabric on her skin.

He is panting, watching her. 

“Fuck _. Christ_ , Rey—”

She does not stop walking.

If he follows behind — if he had dived in after her, if he kept on following, if he should trail behind her in the mud of the aftersummer — well then, those are his choices.

“Re—Rey!”

He grasps her shoulder and turns her and she nearly trips, but for his large hands upon her shoulders, warmer than the early morning swim warranted. “What is this?!”

He brings up her rope-tied hands, and she shoves them against his chest with all strength, not that much remains. 

She knows this for what it is: petty and pitiful. She cannot help it. She doesn’t _want_ to help it. 

She turns away quickly, resumes her brisk walk towards the scatter of the rest of her clothes, toes squishing into the soft and muddy ground.

Numb, and overwhelmed, and a wild contradiction to her own self.

“What… were—were you trying the water escape?!”

The rope chafes as she tries to slip from the knot; she does not stop walking until she gets to her breeches. They are damp against the wet ground, discarded too close to the river. She picks them up with both hands, tosses them by her shirt, a few paces away. She is shivering.

“Rey! Rey...”

She puts the rope between her teeth and _pulls._

It does not give; it tightens, squeezing her wrists, the cords digging into her wet skin. 

A deflated mid-September dawn creeps overhead, the slow bloom of colour over the river and the forest and the distant hills. It is less the emergence of light, and more the disappearance of chalky darkness. The chill, however, stays.

Her teeth chatter. The rope starts to feel oppressive;

_Not good enough,_ as the light starts to spill, and this inevitable day comes upon them both, _not good enough,_ Rey thinks, as her wrists chafe and the knot holds, even as Ben comes to stand before her — gently, perhaps; too soon — to take her furious fidgeting against the rope into his own hands.

“Rey. Why would you even—”

“Don’t. Just... don’t.”

She has no words for this anger. Only the wishing, somehow, that her mind would stop accusing her for it _._ Even now, with him before her. She looks down at his hands. They are large and gentle as they work the knot, and _there:_ the gentleness that brought her here in the first place. 

Eyes closed, she breathes. Hates herself a little more.

“That’s it. That’s it, just—just take deep breaths.”

She bites against the trembling on her lips as he undoes the knot that binds her wrists.

(She can taste the salt in her tears.)

She makes to take her hands back, but he holds them fast.

“Rey?” He is looking down at where he holds her hands tightly. “Exactly what were you doing? Out there, in the river?”

She would take the coward’s way out and look away, but that feels like losing, and she refuses to lose. Not now. Not when she has already lost.

What she tells him: “Practicing.”

What she does not tell him — something he is aware of — is that she does not want to see him, does not want to say goodbye; not this summer, just as she has never been given to saying goodbye during _any_ of their spent summers, but most especially not this one.

What she does not tell him — something he will never know — is that she _knows._ She saw him, just last week, in town, when she herself had been out on an unsanctioned trip looking for a cabinetmaker to secretly commission for a trick she had been working on; instead, she had seen him at the market, laughing with a young woman. Rey had ducked her head whilst observing:

The woman was tall, with golden hair and a round, beautiful face. It was not that she wore a frilly grey-blue dress of impeccable make and fashion, as Rey could see even from afar, but that she carried _herself_ with the airs that matched her whole appearance; the grace she bore, even next to Ben, felt merited. The two of them looked _right_ — a proper set, a lovely couple — and for the first time, Rey had become aware of how incredibly lacking she was in every conceivable department that set this other woman apart.

Rey and her plain, everyday muslin dresses and the occasional makeshift breeches. Rey and her knobby knees and playing cards and old purple rubber ball. Rey and her borrowed tricks.

She was neither handsome, nor handsomely born. Neither girl, nor woman yet. Neither deserving of her wardship, nor pitiful for the privilege.

She was just Rey. Neither here nor there. Rey of nowhere. 

And there Ben was. Obliviously enjoying company that wasn’t her. As he can, the way she cannot.

It had always followed her; the inevitable inadequacy. The telling shadow that orphans carried with them. The notion of not having.

Like a scab she had only just noticed, she picked at it and pondered the feelings all the way home that day — sent to bed without supper for disobedience — and was aloof for the whole of the next. Until she was summoned by her guardian to his study. He reprimanded her with a distant, unfeeling coldness, as though the task of speaking to her fell last in the list of things he was only just getting to. As though she hadn’t just stolen a horse to town and could have disappeared and never come back, if she had been so inclined.

Until Rey could bear it no longer.

She asked her guardian why he had ever bothered taking her in at all, when he did not care for her in any way.

The words came out in a heady rush, and Rey felt the shame — the childishness, the ingratitude — immediately after. To which her guardian had responded in a way that Rey should have perhaps foreseen, had she not buried her head in daydreams of magic:

He stood up abruptly, approached her, and hit her face with the back of his hand. 

It had happened too suddenly.

She had not the time to take in his expression.

And then, it had made sense.

Not in any particular way. But in the grand recognition of one’s own folly: Rey was as she always had been — terribly alone. A roof over her head, a bed, food, and an education would not change that.

And yet, here she was. River-soaked and sad, her heart beating fast secrets. Standing in front of a boy who would be leaving today — who always leaves, _always —_ and yet, feeling like she were not alone at all when she is with him.

Ben, however, is uninformed of her affairs;

Instead, she sees how something terrible curdles behind the way his tongue works his mouth. A glimpse of dissatisfaction — almost _frustration —_ lines his brows as he considers her answer. He does not look her in the eyes; he keeps his head bowed to where he goes back to working the knot loose.

“Practicing.” He repeats the word lowly, fingers firmly tugging, and _oh,_ she knows this. The simmer of his anger is something she has seen only in small pieces. Never the whole, and never at her.

His words break between breaths and the tugs of his hands on the rope: “You mean... to tell me... you used the _langford double_ —”

“Ben—”

“It’s not—” he tugs sharply; she nearly tumbles forward but for the mud that sucks her feet into the ground, “—it’s not— _fuck,_ it’s not a wet knot, Rey, what were you _thinking?!_ ”

The rope falls to her feet, uncoiling and heavy, but even then he does not stop grasping her hands. He is gritting his teeth. His breaths are tight, tense things that waver between them, and it is all Rey could do to keep from noticing the way her breaths come out in the same way.

“I wasn’t,” is what she tells him. Small and true.

Something softens in his eyes. Perhaps it’s the dawn, creeping in to slowly colour them in the cold amber of the end of summer. 

His last day at the estate is today. The servants have readied their luggage, the carriages are loaded. The ship will be waiting in the crowded docks of Liverpool, to float the Organa-Solos away from Rey’s world once again.

The leaving feels less like being left, if there are no goodbyes.

She didn’t want to see him today. She only wanted to practice.

Instead, now, she is the object of his disdain.

“Why? Why would you—” Ben finally lets go, only to pass an aggravated hand over his face, over his mouth, as though trying to keep words in that had no business being said. 

His agitation towards her is painful to watch. But she holds her ground.

“I didn’t see you all this week,” he says. It comes out like a confession.

“I’ve been busy.”

“Practicing?”

And the confusion, the agitation is back. Only now, Rey sees it for what it is: hurt.

“Y-yes. Yes, practicing.”

The image of him in town with a beautiful woman comes up unbidden. She continues, because she cannot help it:

“I’m sure you’ve more things to bother with than—”

“I went to the hill _every day._ Every day, Rey. You weren’t—you weren’t there. And God forbid, if anything happened and I would _never_ have known, I wouldn’t know, I would have no idea, I can’t even ask—”

He chokes. Looks down, bites down. 

Rey watches the rest of his words get swallowed, his throat bobbing at the motion. Frustration. Anger. An inarticulation that does not fit him.

_I love you._

She thinks this so suddenly that she jerks her hands from his; the motion is fast, too frightened. As though he’d burned her.

Perhaps he did.

Her heart is hammering, her cold, wet body filling with a frightened sort of electricity. _I love you,_ and she wants to run away, _I love you,_ and she wants to drown.

_I love you, I love you, I love you,_ and she wants to scream mercy from this ache that comes with knowing he will never feel the same. That the only friend — the only _family —_ she has ever had, she cannot truly have.

“Never asked you to come,” is what she says instead; a quiet, watery whisper. 

His eyes snap up to hers so fast.

Only, the dawn has crept;

And when their gazes meet, his face is painted by a warm yellow; his eyelashes are wet…

And his eyes flit down to where the light has rendered her thin, wet garments into transparency.

The cotton clings to her, the shape of her shoulders, the curve of her waist. The peaks of her small breasts, hard against the early morning. The feeling of her chemise and drawers leaving little to the imagination and the weight of his eyes lingering on her body;

Rey feels a fierce blush blaze high, bright, hot and upwards. 

(If he hadn’t burned her before, he certainly does so now.)

They turn away from each other at the same time;

Her, towards her clothing, scattered about as can be seen by the lengthy shadows of first light. Him, away. Just away, and if she glances at his back turned, reading his posture, the hand at his hip, the other running over his wet locks, aggressively passing over his face, his shoulders almost shaking…

Would it be so terrible, to want to memorise the planes of his body, the way he stands? Surely, it would be forgivable, on her part.

She is in love with him, after all.

They stand there, the two of them paces away, as Rey quickly wears her shirtwaist, her jacket, her breeches. Thinking, hard, about the way his eyes had lingered;

Memorising the way it had felt for one moment, as though she were wanted by the one person who mattered to her the most.

She picks up her scarf and when she is done, she places a hand on his shoulder. He turns towards her.

Her gaze is pointed in the distance and when she speaks, it takes all of her courage:

“You didn’t have to come after me, and I—I’m sorry. For… being predisposed all week.” It is difficult, to say the least, but she looks at him. “I was tired. That’s all it was.”

She forces a smile. His brows curl.

“Why are you lying?”

But it is not accusatory, only troubled. A genuine question, as sincere as their friendship is deep.

“I’m not,” she lies.

“You—do you realise you could have drowned?! This is not a game. A water escape isn’t a _game,_ Rey—”

“I know that!”

“And what would have happened if I wasn’t there? Tell me, what would you have done if you couldn’t slip a langfo—”

“What does it _matter?!"_ she hisses. The tears are hot and hateful, fresh and angry, and she grits her teeth and sets her jaw and wipes her eyes and stares him down with unnameable indignation.

It chokes her;

The sting of her guardian’s hand against her cheek; the bitter feeling of unwelcome, finally settling into her bones as she accepts just how much she does not belong in the Palpatine estates. Just how much her guardian does not care. Just how ill-suited she is for a man like him.

Just how much she has always been no one, in particular.

But he looks as though she had just slapped him. And then he is taking a step towards her and gentle taking her into his arms and she is letting him.

“It _matters_. To me.”

He tells her this in a quiet press of his lips against her head, and her heaving sobs catch at her throat in his embrace.

She does not know how long it takes for her to still; only that it is not long enough. When the tremors have softened and her grief has settled, he senses this too.

He pulls them back. He holds her shoulders, brushes wet clumps of her hair from where they fall over her face.

She does not look at him. She does not know how.

“I’ll give it back,” is what she says, and she means his grandfather’s journal which she had borrowed, from which all manner of impossible escape tricks had been intricately revealed, but she also means _I’m sorry,_ and perhaps in a little way, _I’ll see you next summer._ With a question mark at the end, if she had courage as well.

“You can keep it,” is what he tells her, but his thumb brushes down her cheek, and she feels the weight of his eyes on her face, and she still cannot look at him but she hopes he means something along the lines of forgiveness.

Forgiveness for what, she is not sure of yet. Perhaps for trying to drown, or for being wrong, or for falling in love. He can pick one.

The morning light draws the cold out, and makes long shadows of the riverside; Rey idly realises that she did not tie her horse, which has disappeared. His horse, on the other hand, is grazing and tied neatly some ways down the river.

"How'd you know where I was?" she asks, hastily swiping beneath her eyes.

He swallows. "I looked. I checked most of our spots."

_Our._ She bites her tongue. “Can I ride back with you?”

She only peeks at his face because the question trails them far away from the tipping gravity of her falling; she finds him looking down with fondness.

“On one condition.”

His smile is too warm that she rolls her eyes and curls her brows. “Oh, never mind, I can walk—”

She makes to extricate herself from his arms but his hold does not give; it delights her, to know this, even before he replies:

“You won’t try to practice any of the escape acts—”

“I can’t promise that—”

“— _without me._ Without my help.”

This does the trick. 

A sick, giddy warmth thrills at the thought of him implying to come back next summer. Even if only for the magic.

Rey bites down a show of her happiness, fits her expression into a sterner mood, but she cannot help the small upturn at the corner of her mouth, even as she tries to bite it down.

She finds a similar happiness threatening to show itself, right there. At the corner of his mouth as well.

“I mean it. You’re too reckless. I’m not letting you practice without anyone—”

She huffs, “I don’t need your _supervision!”_

“— _looking out_ for—I’m not trying to supervise, I just—Godssakes, Rey, you fucking scared me today!”

The following moment is not one that Rey knows how to make sense of; he seems angry so suddenly, the words tumbling out of him, his arms gripping her shoulders, then running down her arms, down to her hands, and he looks at them, their hands together, as his fingers toy with hers. 

She wonders what he hesitates for. What secrets are gurgling just beneath.

“You — you scared me.” 

This one is breathed out like a whisper. She knows he did not mean to repeat, but perhaps it is unintentional.

“I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. Ben, I’m sorry.”

But he still does not look at her;

Instead, he takes her hands and brings them to his lips;

Rey gasps — softly, secretly — when his mouth presses hard against her fingers even as his head is bowed down, cowed over her hands;

His lips linger, and then press again over her knuckles, then her wrists; over and over, again and again, his mouth on her hands, as though desperate, as though angry, as though trying to tell her something in a language he has not yet learned, until she is desperate as well, fire blazing inside her body as she watches him mouth at her hands like pressing words that can’t be spoken into her skin.

Until she is moving closer, almost crawling to where his body is;

Until she is placing her mouth beneath his;

Until he is letting go of her hands to wrap an arm around her waist, until she feels his other hand cradle the back of her neck, their bodies wet and pressed together, until through closed eyes she feels, and feels, and _feels,_ mouth caressing against his, until her lips slip open and she feels his tongue on hers, until fire lights low in her belly and the early morning cold dissipates completely;

Until the beating of her heart becomes a distant, wild rumble compared to the heat that licks up and up, making her thighs tremble and her breaths catch and her nerves like crackle;

Until the focus of pleasure becomes unbearable and she moans into his mouth;

And she feels his hand tighten and grasp for the braided hair at the base of her neck;

And she feels _other things_ harken to the wanton sound, south of their bodies;

The thought throws her wholly into a furnace, and her hips stutter forward of their own accord;

This is what makes him break away, and only now does Rey feel the utter breathlessness of being thoroughly kissed;

And touched, and devoured, and perhaps a little wanted, if only in the moment.

“We should head back,” she says as though outside of her body, her words coming out like a whine as she catches her breath. Her hands are still grasping his back, and she has no memory of how they got here; only that she does not want to let go.

“Yes. Yes we should,” he replies, even as his mouth returns — open and mutinous against his words — to hers; Rey opens just the same; a dark, vindictive joy bubbling at the instinct of moving her lips against his.

He tastes like nothing else;

Heady, warm softness. He tastes like falling. Like summer.

Like the whole art of conjuring in itself.

Then he moves to her neck, and Rey promptly loses all thoughts to sensation;

She shivers violently; she feels his mouth curve upwards as he licks a stripe against her wet skin, up to beneath her ear;

“We—we must. The horses—” is all the coherence she manages before he sucks at her pulsepoint in earnest.

His answer is muffled into her neck, but she thinks it sounds affirmative either way. 

When the hand that curves against her waist lowers to palm at her arse, then even lower and closer to her center, Rey _keens,_ the thrill sending violent heat down to between her legs and all over her body;

He feels this immediately and groans himself.

Rey can _feel_ exactly how much he feels this. 

“Your—” Rey breathes past his ear, where he is hunched over as he mouths at the hollow in her throat; she can hear the blood pumping in her ears and nothing else, “They’ll be looking for you—”

“Mhmm.” He hums and her fingers curl into his shoulder as he tastes her skin. She feels her back arching at his touch.

“—worried. The servants… they will talk—”

“Fuck them. Fuck them all,” he pants between kissing the skin by her collarbones.

Rey groans as his hips seem to press against her harder and if he knew how the waves have started to dangerously build and how close she is, how _terribly_ close she is, she would be mortified;

It is a blessing — an absolute _curse —_ then, that they both hear the sound of approaching hooves at the same time;

They both freeze a moment, terror doing its work, and then Ben is hauling them both onto the ground as the dangerously closer and louder clopping ghosts over their wet, dawn-dense bodies on the grass. The sound gets close, almost _too close,_ a happiness whistling from the rider and Rey could even recognise the tune. 

Her heart is beating wildly where she is almost draped over Ben’s side, his arm around her shoulder, with nothing but the tall grass on the side of the dirt road to hide them. The both of them completely exposed, should this passer-by chance upon two sodding-wet teenagers lying on the ground in the morning light. The height of scandal.

What, perhaps, would happen then?

Her reputation would be ruined. She would be disowned, perhaps; returned to St. Jackson’s to live the destitute life she was always meant to have, eventually having to marry in order to survive, or at the very least, work at the docks or the brothels to make a passable living. No longer able to practice or even _dream_ of magic...

But she shudders at the thought of Ben;

Whose near-noble birth and standing would be utterly _destroyed_ by her. Perhaps he’d even forced to wed her, against his status and against his will…

The thought is a violent, choking sadness that she wills away.

But the unholy terror of it is quickly derailed by shaking, barely-constrained chuckle from the body beneath her;

She turns her head as much as she can where she is pressed against his side, and finds the right bastard actually _laughing._ His eyes nearly crinkled shut. His shoulders shaking in soundless joy, his other hand around his mouth.

“What’s so funny?” she whispers against his side.

The arm around her shoulders tightens just so, brings her towards him.

He looks down at her. His mouth is curled upwards, almost against its will; a smirk, thoughtful and happy and _secretive._ Always, him and his secrets. 

She looks away, unable to meet the fondness of the last five summers written in his gaze.

Her cheeks feel immensely hot. She feels giddy and warm and self-conscious and _terrible_. So terrible.

“What’s so funny,” she huffs, looking somewhere in the distance. He doesn’t answer immediately, so she sighs before gently pulling away from him. Making to stand up and put a little distance.

An attempt at pretending he hasn’t just kissed her senseless and set her whole body on fire, and she hasn’t just nearly stained the Organa-Solo name with a bloody scandal.

All the while, still feeling his eyes upon her. He stands as well, and even if she can’t look at his face, she still sees the gentle ease in his movements.

The intrusive trotting of the passerby has long since passed. But so has the heat of the moment.

Leaving Rey nothing but a shy shell of herself. She cannot help the beating of her heart, she cannot help looking down, for being so bloody _stupid_ and falling in love with her—

He takes her hand.

She almost doesn’t hear him calmly say “Let’s go home,” before he is leading them to his horse, not sparing another word about what happened. 

When she chances to look at his face, it is warm and kind and so very _him,_ like they had just spent an afternoon in each other’s solitude, and not with the eventful morning they had. She feels herself breathe again.

He hoists her up on the horse, before climbing up himself in front of her. He calmly — almost _confidently,_ and she would roll her eyes at this — takes her hands and wrap them around his torso to cling to him, as they gallop back to the estates.

She smiles, leaning her forehead against his back, against his nape.

She feels him take one of her hands against his chest, and bring her palm to his lips.

The ride back to the Palpatine estates is a good thirty minutes. But it felt only like three, and the shortest three of her life, at that.

They stop in the forest near the Palpatine grounds, the horse whinnying. She takes a moment — a deep, steadying breath — before she dismounts. Preparing to see him ride away without another word passed between them.

Surprisingly, he dismounts after her. And simply… stands in front of her. A good few paces in between them. Looking anywhere else.

She sees the way he is stock still, sees his finger twitch at his sides, as straight as he stands without looking at her. Sees the way he bites the inside of his mouth, collecting his words and his thoughts.

Where his confidence and ease was just earlier, now, he is clearly a little lost.

Perhaps a little nervous, if she dares let herself hope.

“Yes?” she asks him, feeling the dynamic shift completely between them.

He looks at her finally, and she cocks an eyebrow. Daring him on. Knowing now that she must have the upper hand.

Always the game, with the two of them.

“I’m not saying goodbye,” is what he says. Voice low, and final. 

But his eyes are pleading and warm and _oh._

She feels her spirits lift, but she hides the joy with the smirk she gives him in return.

“Good,” is what she tells him.

And if it sounds like a challenge, then it would seem that he accepts, if the returning smirk and ease is any indication. And then he’s shaking his head and almost chuckling silently to himself, hand coming up to mind his mouth, and she is smiling too, she must be, for this wild and wondrous thing between them.

She would move to approach him, she would, but he moves faster and mounts his horse again.

The horse whinnies and neighs and Rey stands back, ready now to watch him gallop away. The happiness not abating.

He looks down and smiles at her.

“Go on, then! Go!” she laughs, after a moment too long of him simply looking at her.

“Wait for me,” he tells her. Not asking, not a request. Eyes filled something Rey doesn’t know how to understand.

And without another word, he gallops away. Back to his estate, and then off to the Americas.

Leaving Rey with nothing but hope, in a language they have not yet learned how to speak.

•❖•

## 1885

When she is not performing, Rey prefers keeping to herself, away from society.

It had been a necessity more than anything, at the beginning of her career; not all segments of London society took kindly to a woman on stage, and there had been more than a few incidences that endangered not only her shows, but her own well-being. She learned early on that her love and ability for magic — such as it was so integral to who she is — made her existence costly, and that every day she had to pay one price or another.

Which is how she had come about hiring Rose as her assistant, some time in the last year.

Rose is a young, educated girl, stalwart and quick on her toes. Indeed, she has come to be Rey’s only friend and companion. Rey feels an immense responsibility for the life of her assistant, alongside her own; they have only each other, after all.

This — alongside the unnerving encounter with the _other_ magician, and the harrowing demands of her patron — is why she spends nearly the whole of the week labouring in her workshop.

Instead of spending the remaining two weeks before her previews attending to the smaller matters of dress rehearsals and attires and practicing her own finishing touches on the wooden carcass of the empty Falcon theatre, Rey had busied herself with the anxiousness of redoing her routine.

So intent was she on perfecting a few new tricks that she’d scarce had time to eat or sleep, and this is never more so apparent than in her jolting awake now at the sudden knocking at her door.

Rey gasps, consciousness flooding her, alongside a brand of lightheadedness reserved for when she’d lived on an empty stomach for several days.

The knocking persists.

Blearily, she grabs a robe, and tries to ascertain the time: based on the sunlight slanting through her small windows, illuminating her very messy kitchen and workshop table in squares of warm pink light, Rey assumes that it must be late afternoon.

The knocking continues, and Rey smooths her hair out, wondering who it could be on a Sunday…

“What’s gotten into you?” Rose frowns at her, then walks right on in.

“Rose? But it’s a Sunday, whatever are you—”

“It’s a Tuesday.”

Rey wrinkles her brows. “It can’t be—”

“It’s a _Tuesday,_ and you best believe it. Haven’t you had none to eat yet? _Christ almighty,_ Rey, I swear on all the saints...” Rose — exasperated, perhaps a little upset — follows this up with a string of what Rey could only guess as chiding profanities in her mother tongue. She flits about Rey’s apartment, tidying up, and sets about preparing food.

Which is just as well; Rey is barely awake as of the moment.

“You keep this up, and one day’ll be too much to handle,” Rose tells her, grumbling all the way as she goes about the small kitchen. “It’d not surprise me if you just disappeared someday, since you seem so keen on it. There’s some letters for you. They were tucked ‘neath your door.”

Rey — still blinking, still processing the fact of it being bloody _Tuesday —_ walks dazedly to her table, where Rose had set several envelopes down.

One of them catches her eye:

The envelope is of cream coloured cardstock, perfumed, as Rey could tell, with lavender and orange blossom. The wax seal bore a small insignia she could barely recall, until it dawned on her — it had been the same one that branded the promotional materials of the very magician she had come to see last week.

There are no revealing marks on the envelope, save for the familiarity of the scents, and the insignia branded in wax. Rey leans heavily on the table when she sets herself down to a seat, feeling all the more lightheaded.

With shaking fingers, she opens the letter; her eyes rove over the familiar, looping, graceful script as she began to read:

> _Dearest Miss Naiman,_
> 
> _I do not presume to hope of your reading this, with the knowledge of my authorship; even now, my thoughts are of this letter burning, while its contents remain unread. It is with these grounded expectations that I pen them down, and I must ask your forgiveness in advance, if you should find anything displeasing in this letter that I expect you would not read._
> 
> _I had not, nor could I have ever hoped in my wildest dreams, to see you on the eve of my first preview performance this season._
> 
> _If I had, if I’d dared, you would not have seen me so._
> 
> _As to how different the circumstances may have been had I any inkling of your presence, I could not say. I have not the words to spare. Far too many years have passed between us, and yet, it seems like none at all; I am overfilled with thoughts, I could hardly be trusted to put them in order, nor would I burden you with such an attempt._
> 
> _Severely underprepared as I was that evening, and as much as I would like to write to you about all manner of things now, I write to say this, and perhaps only this:_
> 
> _I am very pleased to have seen you._
> 
> _And I hope you will permit me to write that I intend to do so again; you have always accused me of impatience, and in this regard, I will concede. If I must lose an evening’s worth of receipts to find myself at the Falcon during our conflict of schedules, then so be it._
> 
> _My only wish is to witness The Marvelous Mistress Kira, of whom I keep hearing, even from across the world’s stage._
> 
> _Rest well; I know you have much to prepare for. I cannot wait to see you perform, as is only fair._
> 
> _Your most humble rival,_ _  
> __Lord Kyle O’Halloran_

By the end of the letter, Rey — whose hand tremors have returned whilst reading — finds herself crowded by her assistant peering over her shoulder. 

Within the space of a page, he has managed to steal her focus away, and what was she to make of how easily he could do so? Where Rey’s head had felt airy, now it feels leaden; she leans on her hand, feeling more than a few conflicting emotions run through her like a river.

She checks the paper; it is but a single page. And yet…

Rey finds a candle, lights it up, and to Rose’s confusion, holds the blank side of the letter gingerly above the soft yellow flame. 

The penmanship that appears is larger, but his all the same.

Rey finds herself biting back a smile as the hidden message slowly appears above the candlelight. Because _of course_ he would; he could not resist hiding things any more than she could resist looking for them.

Because it was always the game with the two of them. Him and his secrets. Her and her chasing.

When at last they can read the postscript, it is Rose who first snickers:

> _P.S._
> 
> _If you need help with any of your tricks, I would be glad to lend my assistance. Say the word, and my ingenieur will be at your disposal. I should hate for your hands to come to accident before I’ve had the chance to be mesmerised._
> 
> _Yours,_ _  
> __Ben_

“The airs of that man!”

Rey would have torn the letter up, heated and furious (in her imagination, if she were made of stronger stuff than the quickening pace of her heart) had Rose not swiped it from her to read and laugh at the secret inscription herself; 

“Oi, you never told me you had a sweetheart! And a cheeky one, too...”

Despite having to bat away Rose’s incessant teasing and giggling — which would undoubtedly follow her for the foreseeable future — Rey cannot help but have to restrain herself from feeling a small, secret happiness. Her blush is all too revealing.

For she had not called him _hers_ in such a long time.

Indeed, she has not had anything to call truly hers, in quite a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this remains to be one of my most unpopular and yet one of my most favorite fics that i have written. comments and kudos mean a lot, but more than that, im just glad some of yall are with me on this weird ride!
> 
> thank you for waiting while i get my shit together. :)
> 
> once again, i am thanking robbie, aubrey, jess, and just the whole reylo brigade for putting up with this nonsense. yall are ABSURD and i love you. :(
> 
> PS: my current writing mood has been wholly inspired by Dramione and Draco. that bastard. 
> 
> PPS: dramione recs?? pleathe? :( 
> 
> PPPS: @ Tied author, i would like to thank u with my whole heart and also would like to kindly request for you to step on me :((((


End file.
